Archive for June, 2008

You get what you pay for – CalPop worst ISP ever?

Friday, June 27th, 2008

So, I’ve got a machine colocated with CalPop, who offer 10 megabits and 4U for $99/month – $88/month if you prepay for six months.

I’m really wishing I’d chosen a slightly better ISP. Today, they announced that I’m being renumbered and relocated to a different building – today – with no warning. Renumbering means I have to update DNS for all my domains, including name server bindings. The bit that really gets me is the *no warning*. Who doesn’t know that they’re going to have to relocate servers even a day in advance?

So, those of you considering using CalPop for your colocation needs (hint, hint, google) – beware, you might find yourself renumbering with no warning. Or possibly worse – I’m idly worrying about whether they’re renumbering because they couldn’t pay their XO bill.

Failing disks

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

In the past two weeks I have replaced disks in five separate machines – one twice, because the first disk died after only 8 hours of use. These machines are not all in the same room – or even area code. They were all put in service at different times. Two of them were not part of RAID arrays, and one of those actually involved measurable data loss, although we did have recent backups.

I’m a little apprehensive. Something’s up with the universe of stored data.