What's Happening?
At approximately 1:00 AM October 17th both websites went down. heres what i know:
Wednesday, October 22nd 7:00AM EST
Where We Stand:
well another somewhat sleepless night but... I have gotten into a little bit of a "talk" with skiplink via text message to his cell phone. and I have talked to a couple of people at TelX (they have been very helpful). as it stands here is my options:
1. Pay to power up the entire cage for a few hours (I would pay TelX for this), however I'm 99% sure skiplink has terminated his outside lines.
2. Give TelX the serial numbers (or something identifyable) about the servers; they would go in and borrow them is i sign a waiver. (however skiplink refuses to give me such information)
3. Pay TelX to turn on each box with a monitor handy to check the command prompt to look for my internal server names.
4. Wait 120 days until they can legally repo the servers and claim mine
Obviously option #2 is the best, and I'm convincing skiplink to allow me to do this (e.g. give me something identifiable about the servers). #3 is another, albeit expensive option, however would put me at risk of potentially damaging other peoples servers and being held liable. and #4 would be my fall back option of last resort. these seem to be my only options short of hiring a lawyer to help with #2.
I'd like to talk the staff at TelX for being very helpful and professional about the whole thing. Hopefully Skiplink will get back to me with some serial numbers soon. once again i'll keep you all posted; and thanks again for everyones support.
P.S. a couple people have suggested a 5th option of hiring Ninjas and/or Pirates to retrieve the data... I'll work on that.'
Tuesday, October 21st 5:49PM EST
Confirmed that skiplink is locked out due to lack of payment. Talked to a few people at TelX, best they can do for me at this point is power up the entire cage (I pay for it) and hope my stuff turns on etc. however I also got a few text messages from Skiplink and he has obviously already canceled the network connections into the unit and there would be no chance of them being visible. so I'll keep trying to convince skiplink to tell me the serial numbers from the boxes or something else to identify them so i can actually get the boxes hooked up. *sigh*
I'll keep everyone posted if I get anywhere.
Tuesday, October 21st 8:46AM EST
Well I've been reading through my backlog of about 200 emails, and i found one from someone who has said that skiplinks assets are being held by TelX for non-payment of bills. if this is not resolved I might be SOL. If anyone happens to know anyone who works in that building that might be able to "borrow" the server or the hard drives for a few hours so that I might be able to just copy off the data it would be greatly appreciated. other then that I dont have much to report, and I honestly dont know what to do.
Tuesday, October 21st 7:00AM EST
Still nothing from skiplink, i REALLY wish they would just get back to me with something, or a timeframe for getting back up.
Thanks for everyone who is offering hosting, I have figured out what I'm going to do once i can get ahold of the data again. for now there is nothing to do but wait.
Sunday, October 19th 7:10PM EST
No word from skiplink today, They are being very unprofessional and this is pissing me off. I will be moving the servers ASAP once i get them back up at skiplink so that i can move the date.
Right now it looks like i'm going to move to Amazon EC2. this looks to be the best solution and should in theory actually reduce my costs monthly by a couple hundred dollars. and if i can later set it up to start and kill servers at peak times i should be able to save a little more again.
All this aside I have definitely learned the use of off-site backups. once the servers are moved I will be adding in some backup scripts to send the backups around the world. I'll have some stats of what I would need for backups later and ask around to see if anyone would be willing to host backups.
Saturday, October 18th 11:40PM EST
I got a few text messages from the owner FINALLY.. seems the hardware failure for the building was unrelated. skiplink apparently had a disagreement with someone over something and therefor my boxes are offline. they will be moving the boxes to a new location hopefully tomorrow. needless to say I am not impressed, and I will be moving to a new host ASAP. (right now I'm thinking about EC2)
Saturday, October 18th 7:57PM EST
No news yet, still no word from skiplink, and only some 2nd hand knowledge from inside the building. I have to head out for the night, if anyone has some important info, email me i'll have my phone with me.'
Saturday, October 18th 1:01PM EST
Update: well a guy who knows a guy has informed me that the entire building is down. (thanks Jeff) No real specifics on why, but everything is down and I'm waiting to hear back with more information. at least i can be relatively sure the data is safe, just unaccessible.
Saturday, October 18th 10:19AM EST
when the server went down at first I dident think anything was wrong with the site. I attempted to call Skiplink (my server provider) to find out if anything was wrong. They dident answer, but it was 1 AM, so i left it for the time being.
The next day In the morning the server still was not up, so I gave them another call, they did not answer. It was at this point I noticed that my 2nd server (same company, different carrier, different physical rack) was also not up. And I this is where i start panicking... the 2nd server was the backups for the first.
I have emailed, txt'd, phoned (5 different numbers) and I have yet to get ahold of anyone. If anyone knows anyone that works at
http://www.56marietta.com, this is the building where the servers are housed.. could you get them to find out if anything is going on there and shoot me an email. I would REALLY appreciate it.
I'll go freak out on my own now and update this page whenever I find out anything new.
P.S. come back for updates if i have any.
Mike Valstar
mikevalstar@*****.com
