Richard’s Blog-o-Shite

On Boxing Day, Demon’s DNS servers/records basically died. This meant that customers’ web sites disappeared but more importantly because there were no DNS records at all, e-mails also disappeared.

I first noticed this when my e-mail server wasn’t apparently responding - we have the SMTP e-mail service so all e-mail for a domain name is pushed to this server - and when I checked on Demon’s network status page, nothing untoward was reported.

So I waited for a while in preference to banging my head against a wall, also known as ringing the non-UK technical support [sic] call centre. Since Demon was taken over a few years back and the first line support out-sourced or otherwise transferred abroad, ringing them has been a complete waste of time as they Don’t Have A Fucking Clue which, coupled with a Cannot Be Arsed attitude, adds up to more annoyance for the poor customer.

In my case, we’re being billed incorrectly still - the wrong rate and the wrong name - which is why our bills are almost double what they should be (and there’s the small matter of a one-off charge for £700 recently…) despite two phone calls recently and a letter earlier in the year. Yes, a letter. To an Internet Services Provider. And to cap it all, I recently received two letters with identical content from them on the same day both saying “as you have not been in touch…”.

Pathetic!

It’s just as well the broadband product itself is pretty good, though at £40+VAT (or £69+VAT as they haven’t managed to sort out the billing yet) per month, it bloody well should be good. And yes, our 20:1 contended, 8Mbps service is actually only performing at around 2500kbps but hey…

So anyway. Back to Boxing Day. I eventually decided to ring them and chose the option for the automated status line which was a good call as only then did I discover that yes, they were having a complete DNS failure, which was eventually resolved very late on.

So what does their Network Status Message of the Day have to say about it? Nothing. It’s as though it had never happened!

…who appear to have all their eggs in one basket, which should be a worry for its customers.

One of their servers apparently failed on 1 December 2007 - coincidentally the server where the Help Forums are hosted (including the Server Status Forum…).

Unfortunately for their customers, that was a Saturday and Internet services provider ezboard, Inc. don’t work weekends… Three days later and they were still copying data to other servers. Five days later and people were finally seeing their boards up and running and the missing data restored.

Of course, some were not quite so lucky and they are awaiting the one member of staff who can apparently fix things:

“ckerr wasn’t available yesterday and I don’t think he is in the office today. I did give the URL to your board and this topic to one of the other technicians and he tried reloading your board, but the missing forums didn’t display. He said they are still there, but ckerr will have to be the one to yank them out of hiding. (There are simply some ezboard things no one but ckerr can fix.)”

Now excuse me, but if there’s only one person who can fix things when they go wrong, I’d love to see ezboard, Inc.’s Risk Analysis/Statement … if they have such a thing, of course!

Oh and it’s the same with yuku: a user who is hosting their domain name with ezboard has been having DNS issues for months apparently. ezboard’s reply when they promised to sort it out after the weekend?

“I think you might have been bumped down the list by the inbox problems.”