.:Computer Defense:.

I had mentioned that there may be some downtime as I transitioned this site (and a number of my other sites) over to new servers. I'm starting to think that this will never happen. I mentioned the servers that I had ordered last week from 1and1 (a company who's service I've been impressed with for the past 5 years or so). The servers were prepared quicker than expected, one with CentOS 5 and one with Windows Server 2003. I began using CentOS 5, however I realized that I'm much more a fan of the Debian structure, so I requested a server reimaging with Debian 4.0. (1and1 has a reimage on command button with a wide range of images). I got my Debian server up and running and everything was going well.

Sudden, however, I couldn't SSH into it. I checked via console (you also get console access) and found that it was down. I rebooted and all was well. A day later the same thing happened. So now the server has crashed at least once every 24 hours, since I got it. On Friday I'd been going fine for a day and a half or so and suddenly it locked up again. Completely unresponsive. So I sent in a support ticket and received a response with the phone number for their 24 / 7 dedicated server support. I called and after a brief conversation was told that if my server had nothing important, they would have the hardware replaced and the machine reimaged. I'd have to reconfigure it again but that was all, so I said sure. A couple hours later I got an email saying it was ready to go, so I went through and configured it again Saturday morning. Saturday night, it hung yet again, so I decided their may be something wrong with their Debian system and went back to CentOS 5. I configured it (compiling nothing from source, and using only the yum repositories to ensure it wasn't software I installed). Yet this morning the server was down yet again. This time with libc related segfaults on the console during boot.

I called in and was rather unimpressed. I was told that since it wasn't hardware this wasn't the type of issue they deal with. I couldn't believe the response... it's their hardware, their image, their yum repository. I haven't obtained anything that they were not the source of, and they still wouldn't help. At this point, I'm pretty fed up... but at the same time I've received great customer service for so long. It's really disheartening. I recommend 1and1 to everyone I know and now it's blowing up in my face.

I've decided to give the server one more try (this time on Ubuntu -- my favourite Linux distro) and if it still fails then I'm going to walk away and start a letter writing campaign.