Our colocation facility has lost a router and they are working as fast as possible to get it up and running.
I have a call with the facility manager there and will keep you posted as soon as I get any more info.
Again, I appoligize for this and we are going to be working with the colocation facility early next week to address the problem or we will be moving. That will be my recommendation at least!
I am going over to our colo now. We're in downtown Oakland, so the colo is just about 3 blocks from here. It's directly across the street from the big Pacific Bell phone building and one of the major internet points of presence here in the San Francisco area. So as you can normally their shouldnt be much trouble we're right next to the phone company. There is only one person between us and them, our colo.
I believe they had a power surge to one of their high end cisco routers a couple weeks ago and something tells me that it's probably acting up. What they need is two of those routers so if one has trouble they have another to take over. That is what most places do. However each router is $75k or so...
I should be back in 30 minutes. I'm not sure what I'll find out because I'm just going to wander the building looking for someone and knocking on doors.
I just got back from talking to the people at the Pac West facility. Their Cisco 7513 died. Fully loaded it is a $150k piece of equipment. I briefly talked about them getting some redundancy and they agreed it was needed. They were very busy so I didn't want to bother them too much.
We talked for a few minutes and then the new Cisco 7513 arrived from a Cisco courier and they told me they had everything taken apart and should have it back in in about 30 minutes. That was about 6:10pm. However engineers always think they are better than they are and underestimate so I told them I'll be happy to see it running in 45 minutes to an hours.
So I believe things should be cooking again around 6:50-7pm. Hmm, cooking may not be the best word because I also asked them about the power surge that started this all about 3 weeks ago. It wasn't a power surge at all. The power went out in the building and their backups kicked in perfectly for all the computer equipment. However the generate for the Air Condidtioning of the room did not. So in just a few minutes the room heated up from 65 degrees Far. to 120+ degrees and that is when the Cisco router burnt out. They replaced some parts in it then but it just hasn't been the same. They will be getting an all new replacement.
I dont know all the finer details about electronics getting hot so that's about as much as I can say.
Thanks for hanging in there. We will be back online as soon as the new router comes online.
There will be an announcement on our help pages and you may fill out a help request if you have any further trouble. We will also begin receiving any emails you may have sent as soon as things come back online. If you have any futher questions please email or post to our help board as I will be very busy for the next 2-3 hours answering quetions in the support system or email and probably wont be able to peek back in here.
posted on September 2, 2000 09:38:05 PM
took me for ever to get things up and running when ebud changed over to the new system. they had the wrong password in their servers and it would not let me use the software. after a few phone calls ebud got it up and running but the writing was on the wall.
this was my biggest fear when the change was going on, now we are at the mercy of ebud and auction poster or should I say their servers. I can do everything on my end to insure that the software will work. have a good computer, back up power supplies, I even have a back up generator on my trailer I can run to the house to cover my rear. We can pay for the net service, pay for ebud, but if ebud has a problem were stuck.
you guys need to come up with something in your software that if it can't detect your server you don't leave us high and dry. There have been other times that ebud has gone to the server and just hung up. you need to have a way that if it does not detect the server to give us a pass to use the software for a week without looking at your server again for validation until you could get things fixed. something along these lines would be a great improvement.
In case you do peek back in, I'm curious if anyone back at the brain trust has given any thought to scrapping that validation system of yours? I realize you're in this to make money and must protect your intellectual property, but you must realize that we (the users) are being hampered in that same goal by your paranoia. You really should come up with a different system, other companies manage to do it.
I didn't mind the change to a subscription model because I assumed it would serve to improve the product, but I thought I was licensing a piece of software, not becoming part of an online service that's all too frequently offline. It's bad enough that I have to depend on eBay's servers.
If you note a tone of displeasure in my post it may be because my eBud database has become totally screwed since trying to refresh when these most recent troubles began. I paid my fee less than a year ago, maybe you can tell me how to get a refund? I can spring for a new toner cartridge and go back to printing out my eBay EOA notices and managing my auctions on paper (slower but it least I control the process).
Yes we are discussing this with John now. He still does most of the eBud programming.
bemused,
We are always open to any ideas and have a comments form on our site that is sent to all of us here. I am not familar with your other database issue but if you fill out a help request on the form on the site we will be glad to look into it.
posted on September 3, 2000 06:19:32 AM
I've deleted eBud from my system. I hate the annual subscription, and the fact that the program has to access the web site every time you start it is just ridiculous.
posted on September 3, 2000 09:42:20 AM
This happened a couple of months ago - the eBud site went down, rendering the software useless - and we had the same disscussion.
So I'll reiterate my point: you have a copy protection scheme that unfairly penalizes your paying customers. Don't just hope that it won't happen again. Please fix it.
posted on September 7, 2000 07:39:47 AM
I too got tired of the problems with eBud, and the change to the subscription mode, since that is NOT what I agreed to when I purchased the program. I am surprised that someone hasn't sued about this change.
I now use Auction Tamer, their support is the best available I have even spoken to the designer when I had a problem. They are highly recommended by C-Net, and Tucows -
Sometimes a system like eBud gets too big (in the head) to remember the customers who made it - sort of like eBay.
