Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

For some time, I was hosting ozvoipstatus.com with Servers Australia.

I moved recently, after they absolutely demonstrated their ignorance and incompetence of a routing issue within their network to the good people at MaxoTel, who also colocate with these idiots in Sydney.

Before the move, I would see intermittent increases in latency, random packet loss, and 8 hour outages with no satisfactory explanation.

Add to that the 2006 and 2007 breaches of their own systems where attackers managed to exploit their own crap, to send emails to all users. And the continual DDoS attacks.

They advanced later in 2007, where they had the network running stable, in a near excellent state. Then, recently, they screwed it over again, and they still screw people over.

I think to myself now, why did I put up with them for so long? The answer is easy, because like all incompetent idiots, they couldn’t ever get the billing right, so that was to their disadvanatage, and gave me only a little to complain about.

Flash forward to last week, I’m emailing them about a routing error to MaxoTel, they don’t have the Sydney and Newcastle networks routed correctly. It was like that for a good month, before the good people at Maxotel noticed it.

I create a ticket stating I can’t reach other IPs in the same IP block, and I can’t reach the other IP block (their Sydney IP block).

Anyway, the reply I get back from their incompetent Network Operations Centre 24 hours after reporting the issue, too bad if it was actually a network outage, because they’d be too busy watching YouTube (I have an email from them stating exactly that) – “The default gateway is set incorrectly”..

What? How is that possible. The sites and server are online, I can reach everything else (heck, I did the ping and traceroutes from the actual server), it’s been set to the right default gateway for a year or more.

So, I replied showing my clear frustration and disappointment that someone employed in Australia can be so incompetent, and yet be in a position responsible for the Network Administration. The idiot didn’t test, disregarded the testing I had provided, and replied on some useless assumption, ignoring the fact the second IP block was also unreachable. All because the IP I tested was 119.63.204.1 (and others, I just used that as an example.. )

Then, I get a reply from the ‘director’ (who is just an immature turd that started Servers Australia) who also doesn’t bother to read the previous content and tells me he’ll unplug it in 7 days.

I figure that’s fine, and reply advising him as such,  to which he replied with 24 hours. A little sudden, but the good folk at Inticon, who I am now hosting with aranged the smooth transition and it was error free.

I’m happy to be away from the rubbish that is Servers Australia. I have mountains of content in emails demonstrating the pure incompetence that is Servers Australia, but I’ve got more time on my hands available now, as I don’t have to monitor the server and make sure it’s up – I can actually trust Inticon to be ‘up’. I can’t say that about Servers Australia’s useless attempt at IP connectivity.

The downside? Inticon is competent, so they’ll probably be billing correctly, so now I’ll have to figure out methods of making the traffic from OzVoIPStatus cover the bills – I don’t have anything in the pipeline yet, I’ve still got an aging web layout sitting on the dev server waiting for tidying up – backend pages to create, edit, adjust.

The thought did cross my mind to stop OzVoIPStatus, and decommission, but I think it’s a useful tool, users like it to find out how reliable a voip provider is – they have opinions they can add.  The maintenance schedule is shot tho, I simply haven’t maintained it at levels I wanted to, and I can’t foresee time in the very near future to finish what I was doing -I’ve got other things still happening.

So, for now, the situation remains – it’s still working, it’s still somewhat useful, I want to put more of the useful features I do have live, but I need time or money for that (time would help to get my stuff live, money would help pay someone else to do exactly what I have in mind)..

OzVoIPStatus seems to be holding steady, the outage logs seem to be a little more accurate since the move. I also did some ICMP tests from Sydney, and I was reaching the old network in an average of 17ms (peaks of 56ms), the new network at Inticon was a constant 5ms. I should have taken screenshots at the time, too busy making sure the transition was smooth to think this far ahead.

My advice to anyone considering Servers Australia: Get a second ADSL2+ line, you could do better on your own connection, for much less!