making good on a promise (Velocity Networks == bad)

My former Internet service provider, OChosting, was recently purchased by a much larger company, Velocity Networks.

As part of that acquisition, they moved my e-mail to some more central server. However, they screwed it up really really badly. The DNS MX records for my domain pointed to an old server, but the CNAME I was using for IMAP was pointing to the old one. The helpdesk was completely useless/powerless to fix the DNS records. (As part of this they were transitioning the old systems to a new management system, ala CPanel, as well. The helpdesk people were only able to deal with accounts that had been transitioned.

Finally I told them they'd not only lose my business, but I'd post my negative experiences here if they didn't get someone to help me quickly. That much they did. But ultimately, the promise that DNS records would clear up when caches flushed never materialized. Two weeks later their servers are still giving out incorrect DNS information. I've been able to access my e-mail by manually editing my /etc/hosts file, supplying a workaround IP address. (I have noticed that their IMAP server has gotten significantly slower since the transition as well. It can take up to 2-3 seconds to delete a message sometimes. Typically it takes about 1 second for the IMAP delete to occur. On my other servers IMAP deletes appear to be "instantaneous".) This doesn't work well for my wife though, and I'm fed up with trying to force feed these guys a clue.

I will point out that I was paying these bozos over $20/month for very modest hosting needs, which is 2-3x the typical market rate. And I'd been doing this for about the last 5 years, with nary a service call in the interim.

Anyway, now I'm making good on my original promise to them.

Anyway, I've been able to recover all my old e-mails (at least the ones that didn't bounce, and who knows how many of those occured!), and I've given my business to Bluehost as of about two days ago. So far, it seems to be going quite well. My e-mail performance seems to be good, and the software they have deployed for CPanel is a bit more sensible as well. (For one, they seem to understand the problem of matching TLS/SSL certificates to hostnames when used for IMAP or SMTP.) I'm also paying $7.95 a month (full year paid in advance) instead of $19.95, and my disk and throughput quotas are much much higher (not that I need them).

I would strongly urge folks considering ISPs to avoid Velocity Networks or any of their affiliates if at all possible. My experience is that they are clueless, and their helpdesk staff are completely hobbled by a combination of restrictions on what they can perform and their own lack of ability.

A big kudos to Bluehost, as well.

live upgrade rocks

Trying to build the latest tree, I ran into the problem that my build machine is downrev (its b74.) So I had to update to 77 to get the latest tree to build.

For any other OS, or in past days for Solaris, this would be a major crisis, incurring numerous hours of downtime. (Or I could use bfu.) But I decided to finally try out live upgrade.

I had an ISO image of b77 stored on a local zfs filesystem (along with all my critical data). When I had installed this system, I had set it up with a spare empty slice matching the / slice in size, in anticipation of one day trying out live upgrade. Boy am I glad I did.

All I had to do was a few commands:

# lucreate -n b77 -m /:/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s3:ufs

(Wait about 20 minutes.)

# lofiadm -a /data/isos/sol-nv-b77-sx86.iso
# mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
# luupgrade -u -n b77 -s /mnt

(Wait another 20-30 minutes.)

# luactivate b77

# init 6

(That last step confused me. I tried "reboot" a few times, before I actually read the output from luactivate to realize that you CANNOT USE REBOOT.)

All in all, the total downtime was the cost of a single reboot. (Well, several in my case, but that's because I didn't follow the instructions and used the wrong reboot command. Doh!)

Total time to upgrade took less time than it took to download the iso in the first place. Using lofi and zfs made this even more painless. Yay. And now I'll never be afraid to upgrade Solaris again. Had this been Windows or Linux I was trying to upgrade, I'd probably have had to kiss off the entire weekend dealing with fallout, etc.

A big kudos to the LU team. (And shame on me for not discovering this cool technology in Solaris earlier... its been around since Solaris 10u1, at least.)

nge is open source!

With the putback of this:

6404761 nge driver need to be opensourced

The nvidia gigE driver is now open source! Yay!

iprb open source....

I just got an e-mail from our contact at Intel, and it looks like the main part of the review required to get iprb approved for release as open source has been done. There are still a few i's to dot and t's to cross, but basically, it looks like we should be good to have this open sourced within the next couple of weeks. Watch this space.

IPv6 video

This is hilarious, if not poignant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0

dnet suspend/resume webrev has been posted

I've posted the webrev for the dnet suspend/resume conversion that I did for the 2007 OpenSolaris Developer Summit. Have a look.

An audio recording (MP3, 12M) of the presentation for those who weren't available to attend is available here.

Sun Opening up more...

So I recently was informed that Sr. management has directed my team to move some of the engineering work that we have been doing "internally" to the OpenSolaris web site. This is more than just moving internal web pages outside the firewall, though. This is about starting to do the actual engineering work in the open.

The first two projects that my group is going to be doing this with are the laptop suspend/resume effort and the SD card stack. (The SD card stack needs to go through some licensing approval first, as the SDA organization doesn't allow for redistribution without a license. The "open" specs are "Evaluation Only" apparently.

Anyway, this is a sign that the practices already being done elsewhere in the company (cf. the networking group) are starting to take hold elsewhere, even in demesnes that have historically been strongholds of the NDA.

Watch the laptop project page at os.o over the next week or so to see what we put up there... and there will be mailing lists for the project engineering as well!