Tag Archives: Apathy

ACS Network Status Update – Sucks

Life, Technology junk, , ,

If I spent 10 minutes writing about every poor experience I’ve had with Alaska Communications I’d be busy writing for over 24 hours. The number of people I’ve interacted with at that company that were actually pleasant to work with could easily be counted on 1 hand, and most of them worked in customer service in Anchorage. Today I’m going to just complain about one interaction with this company, my least favorite organization on the planet (no exaggeration).

The red circle was last Friday, ACS rolled a truck to *upgrade* the speed of my client’s Internet. The blue line is a continuous stream of data between my client and my servers in MN. It’s not obvious from the image above, but the speed *upgrade* took my client off the Internet for a total of 4 hours and 18 minutes during normal business hours. I suppose in the 1990s it was acceptable to have such a large outage for such a modest *upgrade*, but it’s 2014. I suggest that the upgrade was a modest one because they were attempting to go from a 3Mpbs business class service to a 7Mbps business class service. Not long ago I upgraded my low-cost and low-priority home Internet from 6Mbps to 50Mbps. There was no outage and the total amount of invested time on my part was about 15 minutes. In my mind this is how upgrades should happen in 2014.

The Friday outage was split into 2 parts. The first was a lengthy 3 hours and 3 minutes, during which time it was blackout for me. I had no knowledge of what was happening. I was E-mailed prior to the commencement of the upgrade asking if I had any advice. I replied with a basic structure of what my client’s router expects to see in order to reinitiate the connection to the ISP and the disclaimer that if he or she didn’t understand my E-mail then they should postpone the upgrade until we could work together on it. They proceeded so I assumed he knew what he was doing. I was eventually contacted by an individual back at the Alaska Communications call center, they needed my assistance (and understandably so) getting the office back online. I told them to reboot the router, at which point the PPPoE connection came up and all was fine, it seemed the technician did his job OK  just my ddial PPP connection wasn’t coming online. A reboot is simple enough and something that Alaska Communications themselves wouldn’t hesitate to do with most customers, it just so happens my router is slightly more intimidating looking:

After the line came up I asked the technician to not touch anything further and leave the room. Although my client still wasn’t on the Internet, the remaining portion was up to me. I did my business then it was my time to leave work so I started my commute home. The connection stayed up for all of 15 minutes and 10 seconds. About 1 mile into my commute I got a text message saying it was down again. Normally I’d turn around to put myself back at a terminal, but this particular Friday I had a meeting after work that I didn’t want to miss. I continued on my way and did phone troubleshooting with staff at my client’s office.

After probably 45 minutes of great help from one of my client’s employees, we found the inability to connect even just using a laptop and Windows 7’s Internet Connection Wizard. I turned the problem back to Alaska Communications with a phone call back to the individual who had called me earlier. That ACS employee contacted my client’s staff, had them plug the router back in and it miraculously came online. I’m aggravated as I’m sure the ACS employee played it off like nothing was wrong the entire time when there is no doubt in my mind he did something on his end. There is no other explanation since we couldn’t even connect with a generic Windows 7 box. The 2nd outage while only a mere hour was big enough to make 3 9s system when measured over a year.

This brings us past the red circle above and into the orange circle. The Internet was online all of Friday evening, all of Saturday even though speeds dropped in the early morning as you can see, but the connection did stay up. The blue circle encompasses the Sunday outage, one which started about 30 minutes prior to the end of AK Daylight Savings Time. The outage lasted through the day, meaning for an entire day and then some my client could not send nor receive E-mails. Their servers were unreachable so no doubt some correspondence was bounced. ACS doesn’t have a 24 hour business unit, or at least not one with a listed phone number, so I had to wait until they opened at 8:00AM. The good news is even after they opened the technical support I was able to contact was utterly useless. “I can see you’re not online, but we can’t do anything about it without someone onsite.” Certainly I agree it would be nice to have someone onsite, but unfortunately it wasn’t in the cards. The people that would normally be there on a Sunday were out of town this particular weekend. The annoying part was that he didn’t even bother to look at connection logs or any such, they just gave up at “you’re not online.”

About 30 hours past, the connection was brought back to life Monday morning at 8:09AM AK time. This is what availability looked like for the week – Tuesday morning through today, note that the point when the *upgrade* started is clearly visible:

Since their Internet presence returned yesterday morning, my client hasn’t fallen back offline. Their bandwidth remains pretty random. At the end of the day, my only prayer is that I don’t have to work with ACS Personnel, ever again, in my life. They’re one thing I’ve been unable to leave behind by leaving AK, and I wish more than anything that I could change that.

HDS – Frustrated from day 1

Technology junk, , ,

If you know me well you know that I couldn’t care less about what badge your gear wears, as long as it works. On the motocross track I started on red then ended up carrying both yellow and blue in my trailer. I couldn’t tell you which color was my favorite, the all have their own special place in my heart and they all did their job well. The reason I never rode green, I didn’t like the folks who sold it. That fact will play into the remainder of my diatribe.

Paul (my direct peer at work) and myself are trying to make use of the fancy new machine that was set on our floor. HDS came in and configured up our VSP. The tech promised a day to set it up, it ended up being 3.5 days to do 2. I don’t blame the tech that made the promise as he isn’t the one who ended up doing the work; not his fault. That said, if it takes HDS 2 days to set up a paultry 30T (don’t ask how much paultry 30Ts cost!!!) usable array they’re never going to make it in datacenters the likes of a big organization like Microsoft, Google or Amazon. You’d never guess this based upon how much they love boasting how amazing their gear is. Mind you this is our first Hitachi box. We had to listen to endless beating of their own drum Hitachi staff did about how happy we’re going to be getting off IBM and on Hitachi.

Finally the tech is done with the initial setup and it’s ready for us to login to the box and start creating pools, carving LUNs and presenting disks. Probably the most exciting thing for a storage admin, logging onto a fresh array and digging in.

Direct quote from the Hitachi Storage Navigator User Guide:

To log in to Storage Navigator as the super user:
  1. Call your local service representative to obtain the superuser ID and default password.

Yup, here we are. We have an E-mail string going back and forth with pre-sales and the guys who spun the wrenches last week doing the initial config. Meanwhile, Paul and myself are seeing our deadline to have this array online creep closer and closer and the brick is sitting in the datacenter heating our cold air and being very green by wasting 100% of the electricity it’s consuming.

Thus far, I’m not leaping out of my chair with happiness because of our new vendor. If you happen to know the username and password to logon to my array, let me know. I certainly don’t.

The Sad State of Portable Music

Technology junk,

The first tape that I bought with my own hard earned money in my life was Tiffany. I was 8, and while I liked the genre that would ultimately become my lifeblood (hard rock) on this particular day at Meijer in Kalamazoo MI I was choosing Tiffany.

It was great, I could shove that tape in my Walkman, put it in my pocket, listen to it over and over again anytime I wanted. At home on the high speed dubbing dual deck recorder my parents had I could create myself mix tapes, it was remarkable how easy it was to have whatever music I wanted at my fingertips anytime I wanted it.

25 years later, we’ve inherited the World Wide Web, LiPo batteries are keeping our portable devices online for days instead of hours, Amazon’s MP3 store has over 20 million songs available for download at a moments notice, Iron Maiden is still rocking your face off, and I find it difficult to listen to the music I want to at the gym – wut?

Before leaving for the gym today I downloaded a new installment of Voices of Trance from the Generation Trance forums. I’ve been listening to the same old totally awesome playlist on my phone since I bought it about a year ago. It was time for a change. In the past when I wanted change I figured the easiest way was to download one of the frequent installments from DJ GT or AVB as they’re always great to exercise too and obviously full of variety. You get to download and prepare an hour or more music in one big song as opposed to having to create a new playlist by poking through your library of 20,000 or so MP3s and hand picking stuff. By the time you get to the 6th or 7th song with the latter method you find yourself not even caring what you’re picking, you just want your music on the device so that you can get moving.

About 3 months ago I’d say Verizon, or Motorola, or someone was courteous enough to get my phone upgraded to the newest available version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich maybe? I don’t know and long quit caring following the dumb candy versions of Android. I have expectations of my handset and no longer care what OS is underneath making sure those expectations are met. One of the features of the newest update on my phone is they took away my Motorola music player and replaced it with “Play Music.” To thus point I’ve used the sluggish app to pull up my old playlist and play it, a task it was up to although admittedly cumbersome at succeeding in. Today I wanted to generate a new playlist with my new music. I fiddled around on the app for at least 90 seconds trying to find the “new playlist” button and was met with ultimate failure.

My defeat caused me to be distracted for the remainder of my gym session. I spend the entire time thinking about the last time I was this disappointed in a portable music device – it hasn’t happened ever. I thought to myself, maybe I should be carrying my other phone (an iPhone5) but immediately recognized that I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to get MP3s from my computer on to it being that iTunes on my computer is absolutely out of the question.

I wanted to create a chart with my own subjective views on some different capabilities regarding portable devices of my past:

Date (approx) Music Web Phone Total
Original Walkman 1988 5 N/A N/A 5
Panasonic Portable CD Player 1994 7 N/A N/A 7
Ericsson Phone 1996 N/A N/A 5 5
Nokia 6120 1998 N/A N/A 8 8
Creative MuVo TxFM 1999 8 N/A N/A 8
Kyocera Slider 2001 1 0 9 10
HTC Apache 2006 4 4 4 12
HTC Elf 2007 6 5 5 16
HTC Diamond 2 2009 6 6 5 17
HTC HD2 2010 8 8 8 24
HTC Inspire 4g 2011 9 8 9 26
Motorola RAZR Maxx 2012 4 7 8 19
iPhone 5 2013 2 10 10 22

So there you have it, some things get better, but inevitably everything will get screwed up. Granted this is very unscientific, but for each item I can explain my reasoning in the scoring. I’m not surprised that my HTC HD2 and HTC Inspire 4g phones ranked better than the 2 I’m carrying today, they were both much faster on Android 2.x than the current brick. The iPhone is great but can’t compare musically because I’m unwilling to accept that such a great device should require me to go to a site with “hack” in the URL to get music on it.

“Why don’t you stream from di.fm or Pandora?” – The gym has poor cell coverage, neither AT&T nor Verizon is good enough inside the walls of the gym. Beyond that, I do have data limits, something neither Google Play nor ITMS care to concern themselves with for the current consumer apparently.

My Amazon research has led me to the SanDisk Sansa Clip+. I’m hoping it’s adequate. If not I guess I’ll pull out the old Creative MuVo with it’s massive 1GB of storage. Honestly, that’s about it’s only downfall when compared to music players over a decade newer. Shame on you consumer electronics companies.