<nettime> [thingist] THING.NET DOWN

[Wolfgang Staehle <wolfgangsta@thing.net>]

 > Eryk Salvaggio wrote:
 > What's up with the thing.net?
 > -e.


Here's the story:

After Verio cut us off in mid March we did business with a hosting company 
that had a co-location facility right next to our space at 601 W 26. They had 
an over-capacity of bandwidth, a portion of which they "handed off" to us via 
an ethernet cable through the wall for an acceptable sum of money.

It looked like an easy interim solution. But soon the problems started. Since 
they hosted many spammers and porn sites, their whole IP space was 
blacklisted by spam cops like spews.org. A small part of our email never 
reached its destination. The situation became untenable and so on Monday of 
last week we decided to sign a contract with Broadview Networks, a company 
which is also located on the 4th floor of our building, just a bit further 
down the corridor.

However, just a few days later, last Friday, the porn hosting guys suddenly 
went out of business without giving us any advance warning. Apparently they 
build up too much capacity and were deeply in debt. When we confronted them 
they lied to us. They said they would provide services for another week. At 
5pm the line was cut.

Things looked pretty bleak since the Broadview people were all off for the 
weekend and there was no way to speed up the process of getting the new line 
in place anytime soon. The sales rep, on the way to a wedding, told me on the 
phone that it usually takes up to 45 days. Not an option.

After my initial shock and a phase of utter perplexion, I called Paul Garrin 
at name-space.org and Paul collegially agreed to take some of our boxes and 
put them on his network on the same evening. So Walter, Darrel and myself 
hailed a cab, threw 5 servers in the trunk, headed down to the East Village 
(telling the driver to please avoid the worst potholes) and carried them up 5 
flights of stairs. After the DNS switch, most of the sites and email were 
back on line by late Saturday or early Sunday.

But bbs.thing.net, rtmark.com and a few others didn't make the trip. Those are 
now co-located at Broadview. On Monday I turned on the pressure on their 
sales and management people and they finally offered to take us into their 
facility and co-locate the remaining servers until a permanent line is put 
into our space. Their tech guys were very cooperative and got our C-class net 
up by Wednesday afternoon.

So this is what happened, and now you will excuse me because I need to catch 
some sleep. But not before saying a big THANK YOU to Walter, Darrel and Paul. 
Without them, this snafu could have easily spelled THE END.


--------------------------------------------------------------------
t h i n g i s t
message by Wolfgang Staehle <wolfgangsta@thing.net>
archive at http://bbs.thing.net
info: send email to majordomo@bbs.thing.net
and write "info thingist" in the message body
--------------------------------------------------------------------






#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net