My server is still missing!
I tried to contact Parcelforce yesterday morning, phoning every 20 minutes for over 2 hours. Each time I was told, by a recorded message, to call again later. I also tried email, to no effect. Their “phone me” link on their website seemed a bit more promising: I received a call less than 5 seconds after submitting the form. But this call was from another machine that kept me on hold for 22 minutes before letting me talk to a person.
The person (Dave) took my details and then gave me the same details I had already seen on the tracking website. He then told me he would contact the “search team” who would call me within the next two hours.
Six hours later, Steve from the search team called to say he would contact the local depot, but he wouldn’t get a response until Wednesday.
Steve called back today. The local depot had told him that they had attempted delivery on Saturday. I told him that they were either lying or had attempted to deliver to the wrong address: Redbus have 24-hour security who would have been there to accept the parcel.
My server is still missing!
The nice people at Black Cat had planned to install one of our new servers into their racks tonight, but the Parcelforce “guaranteed next day” delivery didn’t happen. That would be bad enough, but we didn’t find out until we arrived at Redbus.
I’m sure Simon from Black Cat had much better things to do, and I would have prefered to spend my £33 on something much tastier than a train ticket.
When I checked the parcel tracking details on the Parcelforce website, it showed that my server had arrived in London and had been sent out for delivery on Saturday; then it just disappeared.
The trip wasn’t a total disappointment: I remembered that London.pm had been invited to meet with London Java, so I went along hoping to either have a good chat with a Perl Monger or spend some time taunting the primitive Java users.
When I arrived I was surprised at how easy it was to categorise the programmers just by appearance. I was also happily surprised that the Java programmers were much more interesting than their language’s intended users. By the time I left, I had mostly forgotten about my server disappointment.
It seems there was a large power cut last night, sometime before 18:00, affecting a wide area of Northern Ireland. As I’m in England I probably wouldn’t have noticed; but the internet service provider in Belfast who hosts my servers went out with the electricity and killed my machines.
I heard that their UPSes worked to keep things alive for a while, and I also heard that their generator started quickly, but it seems that their distribution
panel couldn’t take the strain: we can forgive them for that, as long as it doesn’t happen again.
My main complaint is that I didn’t hear any of these things from my them. We discovered the problem when one of our customers phoned us to complain.
So, I tried to contact our provider, but their phones were dead too.
Their network returned a while later. I could connect to two of my unhappy servers, but my third was still dead.
Their phones rang, but nobody answered.
Then I lost my servers again. This time it seemed to be a routing loop, that twisted all through the night until finally, more than 15 hours after the
incident, someone answered the phone. The routing problem was quickly solved, and my third dead server was revived.
They still haven’t told me anything about what happened.
A service provider needs to maintain their customers’ confidence, especially when things go wrong. They should be able to identify routing problems in their network before I do. They should make sure everything is working after they think they’ve fixed it. And if they can’t do that, they should at least
communicate: they should phone me to explain the problem, and not make it sound like it’s my fault for not having their mobile phone numbers.
This is the third time (that we know of) that we’ve had a service outage. The first time was when they unplugged our servers because they “didn’t know
they were there”. The second time…we don’t know; we noticed one morning that our servers had been disconnected for a while; they were reconnected before we complained, so we waited to hear what the problem was, and we’re still waiting.
