IX post mort em, wet, no year for you!, Sirius sucks, more for the list

I forgot to mention how the latest IX outage panned out.  In total my email was offline from early Friday morning until late Saturday night, a pretty incredible amount of downtime for a huge web host.  I monitored things unraveling on IX’s system status blog. What went down was borderline comical.

In a nutshell IX scheduled to do what they thought was a routine hardware upgrade.  It was so routine that they didn’t even alert their customers it was happening since it should only take a few minutes to complete.  Well evidently things went bad, very bad.

Perhaps because the upgrade was viewed as so mundane that no thought was put into contingency plans if something went wrong.  Well the little upgrade turned into almost two full days of downtime.  As you can imagine, IX customers were not happy.

On the status blog there was a wide variety of methods customers used to voice their displeasure from mild annoyance to all out losing their mind, going ape shit craziness.  For me, I was more on the annoyed but not insane side.  Sure having email offline for me and people I provide email to is a big inconvenience since it is the preferred method of communication for both Ali and myself. However there are people that use IX to provide services for their business customers.  Trying to explain why their services are unavailable for two days is a pretty tough thing to do.

There also was some conflicting information during all of the craziness.  At first we were told all of our emails that came in during the outage should be stored on their Ironport server and delivered eventually.  Well later that story changed and we were told that many people got NDR (non-delivery messages) while attempting to send to the affected servers.

Well knock on wood, everything appears to be back to normal now.  For the inconvenience I was given an extra three months of free service added on to my account which was pretty decent of them.

All I can hope is that a very important lesson was learned by IX’s IT staff.

I forgot to mention Ali got her cold water wet suit delivered on Saturday.  She was still out when it arrived.  I hid the box, thinking I would surprise her with it later that night.  My plans were scuttled when she checked the tracking of the box and saw it was delivered.  She was very excited and wasted little time before she tried it on. Speaking of wet suits, if you want to see Ali swimming a 50 at the water park you can do so here.

Over the weekend I got my letter from Sirius warning me of an upcoming billing cycle for another year of the service.  As I have documented here repeatedly, Sirius has really pissed me off.  If Howard wasn’t on the service I would have dropped it years ago.  Sirius has repeatedly dicked over their customers with bullshit extraneous music royalty fees, online listening fees and outright lies.

Well my year subscription expires in November.  The letter basically said they would be happy to automatically renew me at that time for another year.  Woah.  Sirius has a big problem.  Howard is at the end of his current 5 year contract.  He has mentioned repeatedly on air various issues he has regarding resigning with Sirius. At this point nothing concrete has been put in place to indicate he is going to renew.

Well if Howard leaves I have no reason to keep the service.  So I called up Sirius support and after waiting on hold for 25 f’ing minutes I finally got to speak to someone. Well to be accurate I waited 13 minutes to talk to worthless first level support in India and then another 12 minutes to talk to someone whose first language is English.

I told the guy that I wanted to change my billing to monthly with a paper invoice sent to me.  I wanted the ability to cut the cord immediately if Howard announces he is leaving Sirius.  I told the guy that Sirius is in deep shit if Howard leaves.  He said he had no idea if Howard was going to stay or not but he agreed there will be big problems if he goes.

I almost hope Howard does leave Sirius.  I would much prefer to never give Sirius another penny of my money.

Ali informed me of two more candidates for her “hot” list, Curtis Stone, the celebrity chef guy and Pasha, some ballroom dancer kid from So You think You Can Dance.  The list is getting pretty big.