The saga continues.
Dec. 18th, 2004 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsApparently, one of the geeks at Drizzle decided that I was "hacking" or something, and in the course of about five minutes I slowly found all of my services cut off. First my password was cut out, then my ssh access was denied, and now I can't even get my email. And now their ssh server is denying all contact from my IP address.
All I was trying to do was determine the parameters of their NNTP service, which apparently is a low-speed corporate offering from newsfeeds.com. I don't mind them changing news servers, but the level of service I was getting from them changed in mid-stream, and I do object to them touting this as some amazing improvement when, in fact, it's a drop in performance of 80% and you're not allowed multiple streams, as they have a six-stream limit with newsfeeds.com. Anyone who uses mozilla knows that mozilla always establishes two streams anyway, one for maintenence and one for actual contact, so the maximum number of users they could have reading Usenet at any given time was three if they were using a modern newsreader. Since I was almost always at least one of those users (I'm pretty much connected to Usenet 24/7), I bet they thought my running multiple streamers was excessive and cut me off.
I don't see anything in their terms of service or any of their conditions about the permissions by which I access Usenet, and I'm annoyed that this has all happened Saturday morning, they don't have support staff working on weekends, and nobody has called me. The sweet irony is that in an hour or less the script on my website, to which I now have no access, will update and this complaint will be publicly visible on drizzle itself. Snerk.
So now I'm looking for an alternative. Anyone got one?
In the meantime, you can email me at elf.sternberg@speakeasy.net if you need to get in touch with me.
All I was trying to do was determine the parameters of their NNTP service, which apparently is a low-speed corporate offering from newsfeeds.com. I don't mind them changing news servers, but the level of service I was getting from them changed in mid-stream, and I do object to them touting this as some amazing improvement when, in fact, it's a drop in performance of 80% and you're not allowed multiple streams, as they have a six-stream limit with newsfeeds.com. Anyone who uses mozilla knows that mozilla always establishes two streams anyway, one for maintenence and one for actual contact, so the maximum number of users they could have reading Usenet at any given time was three if they were using a modern newsreader. Since I was almost always at least one of those users (I'm pretty much connected to Usenet 24/7), I bet they thought my running multiple streamers was excessive and cut me off.
I don't see anything in their terms of service or any of their conditions about the permissions by which I access Usenet, and I'm annoyed that this has all happened Saturday morning, they don't have support staff working on weekends, and nobody has called me. The sweet irony is that in an hour or less the script on my website, to which I now have no access, will update and this complaint will be publicly visible on drizzle itself. Snerk.
So now I'm looking for an alternative. Anyone got one?
In the meantime, you can email me at elf.sternberg@speakeasy.net if you need to get in touch with me.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Data points to ponder
Date: 2004-12-20 12:43 am (UTC)Sorry they yanked your access.
Some points to consider:
1) Doesn't sound as though they have a very well thought out escalation path. We would if at all possible notify the customer voice before doing an action like this. They should have at least left you a voice mail explaining what was being done and their reasoning why.
2) Sounds as though they might have disconnected you as a way to get your attention. Are your contact address and phone number up to date? If they thought a live-hax0ring event was taking place, they might have changed your password as a way to protect you from what they thought was a mid-cracking event in progress.
3) If you have not done this already, email the contact you have in a sane normal voice and ask whats up, say you're a long term customer, and you wondered why access has been changed. Maybe this still is "misunderstanding" not "punitive enforcement of just-now-changed policies."
4) Regarding the usenet feed / bandwidth issue. If they just changed upstream providers this might be their way of saying usenet "abuse" will no longer be tolerated. Usenet costs a lot of money because running a feed or a full-leech of some binary groups is probably the most expensive thing in terms of last-mile bandwidth a customer can do. According to the usage breakdowns I see at work .. where I manage the abuse-enforcement function at Speakeasy.
5) Changing policies mid-stream without notifying the customer sucks. We definitely don't do that. On the other hand, if we thought a guy was breaking into our server, we *would* disconnect him on sight, then try and contact him. So I would still approach this as a "they did this to protect your own interest" more than "they did this to attack your connection" sort of thing.
Good luck! And as you are, at least momentarily now, a Speakeasy customer, Welcome!
Re: Data points to ponder
Date: 2004-12-21 05:36 am (UTC)It really does look like I'm going to go a'la carte with my services. I'll use speakeasy as my primary mailbox for now on, buy a domain (I haven't thought of one I like yet, but I have a couple of candidates), and host on someplace cheap. I only do about 2GB of traffic a month, so anyplace that'll put up with that is good for me. Someone suggested Entiki, and they look good, and inexpensive enough that I could afford them and a good Usenet feed.