last year, in may or so, i moved from using a linode vps for my mail and domain hosting, to using hosted exchange for mail and a shared host for the sites. the shared host for the sites has been perfect. i’ve had 99.999% uptime, the only time the sites have been down is during maintenance. this is better than my own uptime with my vps. (i should say that wasn’t any fault of linode who are totally awesome and if you’re in need of a vps, you should look them up.)

why do i pay for mail? there are a few reasons.

1. i don’t trust people with my data. companies that offer enterprise-grade email and communications platforms have a lot more incentive to keep shit private and protect your stuff.

2. i like uptime, i like reliability and i like being able to contact the host to have stuff resolved if something happens, rather than getting to lose mail or something.

3. i like supporting businesses who offer competent, well-engineered, reliable services.

i started off with the hosted exchange company, sherweb, who when i signed up were offering a competitive blend of services and price that was too good to pass up. i really like exchange and i really like outlook and owa. they’re extremely well-integrated, well-tested, reliable platforms for mta use, pc clients and web clients respectively. after having service with sherweb for around 4 months, i started noticing that it seemed like they had downtime two or three times a week. of course, this isn’t a huge deal, but the loss of performance and issues with their (terrible) barracuda hardware firewall/spam appliance made me want to try something else. i read some reviews and against my own better judgement (i despise google) i signed up for google apps premier.

google does lots of stuff i don’t agree with and lots of things that make me really nervous. they don’t do any one thing terribly well. their search algorithms aren’t all that great. their maps platform hasn’t really evolved since it was first released. gmail offers free mail at the expense of letting google rifle through your personal stuff. their metrics allow them to track user site visits and stuff, which is interesting in that you can see who sees your site, but you’re also doing a big disservice to your users by allowing google to follow them around. they’re just a creepy, orwellian company who make money from your personal information and other net-metrics.

getting back to signing up for google apps, i don’t know why i did it. the thought of having what i felt was a somewhat reliable infrastructure keeping my mail flowing and my information safe (their apps privacy policy at the time was very strict and decent, all things considered.) i ran into numerous quirks and broken features and google had their instances of downtime that people seem to have absolutely no problem with. at any rate, the price was right, it was $50/year for mail, contacts, calendar access, documents and it’d sync with my pre. this in itself was significant, because it saved me approximately $60/year over my current hosted exchange provider. i purchased my service, waited for it to be provisioned, then moved all my mail over, set mx records, waited a week, then was ready to roll. i had a total of 12 incidents where i couldn’t access my mail for 4-5 hours at a time. a few of those were reported on as they affected their regular gmail services as well as the premier apps service.

for the most part, their service was alright. i hate gmail’s interface. their calendar support is alright, their docs support is actually pretty good. other than the aforementioned downtime, the system was pretty reliable. fast forward to february, this year. last month, i’d been reading some pretty screwy/scary statements made by folks at google that sort of confirmed my opinion of them re: data security/information as a commodity. it made me nervous, but i still had just a few months left until my apps acct would lapse and i could move my domain somewhere else. one night, i was bored at work and read a bunch of stuff that made me wonder about google’s apps privacy policy, so i went to read it. i wish i hadn’t.

i immediately began looking at my options as i only had a few months left on my account and decided that i’d just go back to another exchange provider. i settled on one, set up an account and was ready to go.  except, the new company didn’t process my order. i had to call the following morning, and spoke to someone who finished processing my order for me. thinking that was that, i logged into the control panel, and saw that postini had hung on provisioning and my account wasn’t ready. i called the provider again who explained that the postini provisioning api had stalled because my existing domain had postini service. it didn’t, so i thanked the guy and went to research it a bit. i learned a few really wonderful things about the google apps platform. you can’t have google apps premium and separate postini service. there’s no reason it shouldn’t work aside from google either being too fucking lazy to figure out a way or just flat-out not wanting users to be able to do it.  at any rate, i researched a bit more and found hundreds of threads on google’s forums and on other forums stating that they couldn’t move from premier to free apps without deleting their domain and having mail service downtime because google has no way to migrate between services. i also found out that when you disable service and delete your domain, it takes them 5 days to delete it. well, that’s what they say on their site, but from what i read, it can take 6-8 weeks in some cases, even with constant contact with google support, for them to finally release your domain. only then, can you add additional services or make changes to things. they also make it impossible to change your domain once your account is provisioned. also, they make it impossible to change your username without using their provisioning api. is it really that hard to add a ui element to let users change their address?

after doing some research and submitting a ticket to google to have postini deleted from my account so i could provision my new mail service, i logged in to get my support PIN and noticed i had no mail. zero mail. i checked docs, that too was empty. looked at my calendar. blank as well. well fuck. at this point, i’m livid. i have my mail backed up in preparation for moving to a new host, so it’s not the fact that i lost my mail that made me mad. it’s that there’s no recourse for it. according to their phone system, it’s not an “emergency” because i have less than 10 users.  at this point, i’m so angry i just contact the new host to see if i could get a temporary MX record to just get the fuck off google apps til i can get them to remove my services. of course, since my luck is so awesome, they won’t do it. i started scouring the interbutts for another hosted exchange provider who might give me a temporary MX record and happened upon the message center. they said they had 24/7 support, so i figured i’d give them a shot. i called their support number and spoke to someone who gave me some suggestions for removing postini/apps stuff from my domain and gave me their phone # on file for google support (which isn’t published on google’s site, btw). the dude also told me that their provisioning system would give me a temporary MX to use until i get squared away with the google bullshit. great.

so i got my mail set up, migrated over, changed my MX records and now i’m waiting til tomorrow when i can actually (hopefully) speak to someone at google and get them to remove their broken fucking apps service and other bullshit from my domain so i can get provisioned with postini service and return to ignoring their existence.

google pledges enterprise reliability, but doesn’t actually have 24/7 support, nor do they actually answer email tickets. i found numerous threads where people hadn’t heard from google in 6-8 WEEKS since submitting a ticket, their issue was still unresolved (and in some cases, totally unacceptable) and yet people still continue using their services. i don’t get it. if they treat their paying customers like shit, what do they do for the folks who use their “free” stuff? gross.

here are some fun GV transcriptions i’ve gotten:

From my good friend Phil, who is having trouble with his monitor:

Hey. It’s Phil calling to ask you questions. Just curious if you’ve ever run into an issue with your monitor like I just did. I think my mother died. I don’t know if you really. Another little, but I just started getting these. Birkel flights like he kinda went past, but I just went black, or the other office til the desktop and Also unlike this little wanna sort of paint all over the screenwriter, redline Jill, I’ve quite live, and I hope this is gonna fill the whole screen with little colors. The. Grink I was well, so try to clear off and just trying to Mon around it’s just a monitors my cos I’m not in the still do it, so I don’t know if you know anything about those type of this crap anyway if if you have a chance give me a call if you could help. If not, I will. P Olympia for a while so. Alright dude. Later.

From Doug, the douchebag tech at Qwest who doesn’t return calls or emails:

Are you. This is Douglas quest tech support. I was asked to give you a call regarding some slow speed issues and dropping connection. Mike with your view. I. P set up or if you have any was alright. Take a look at the levels email what I’m seeing is your upload speed is o’clock in the red, it’s full rate, it actually and it’s about half what it should and I have taken some errors pummeling as well, which I don’t really have any to do is congested Gateway hurt your, and I T data or V D S, L to as it’s also called which it there is really cool congested gateways on on that type of system so something else. Maybe inside wiring issue. Jack as you possibly the modem call me and so yeah but you see a problem, so I’ll be here for the a couple more hours today if you wanna send me an email. I can give me a call back. I want to hear from you. It’s Doug dot Morgan at Qwest, dot, com and again. I’ll be here all day tomorrow so I don’t talk to you today. Thanks so much bye bye now.

From our Realtor:

Hey Chris Calum ward O’Brien doing a couple of things. I printed out a bunch of stuff, just a little while ago. I wanted to get out and fill love and that’ll give them an account. The warm up and then it occurred to me. I, I. I’d check in with you find out how we’re ready to go and then where I need to come pick you up so I can come pick you up and I will get out. Rock and Roll see what we can see it was wonderful slushy dreary morning but in the meantime, just give me a call when you’re up and I got plenty of things I can be David here for a second. I’ll call you back a little bit import see you bye.

So, as you can see, the transcription tech is sort of accurate, but for the most part it just generates what Cadie describes as “weird poetry”.

in other news, i bandaided my warhawk problems with a d-link dir-655, which isn’t terrible for being a d-link product and a consumer wunder-router.  i had already purchased 2 new network cards for my pfsense box before the issues with warhawk surfaced, so i was kind of bummed that the issue was partially sorted by switching from my snazzy pfs machine to a little draft-n router. today, i decided i would install pfsense 1.2.1 again and try and figure out the upnp(?) problems i was having. i installed it, configured it and then restored my vpn configs and stuff and it seems to be working correctly now. what i don’t understand is that nothing but network hardware has changed since i last tried it and network cards really shouldn’t have had any impact, but hey, i’ll take what i can get. now, i need to decide whether i want to take back the d-link or hang on to it for a bit longer in case the problems surface again. another issue is that i HATE HATE HATE the firmware on the d-link and if pfsense continues behaving, the d-link is just an awfully expensive wireless access point..

today, i went to radio shack and got a different antenna (PN200-006) telescoping dingus. I can now easily pick up airband stuff (which is, ultimately, the reason i even wanted the thing) and i can also hear the casino’s radios all the way out here in northwest abq. pretty fun stuff.

i think this could turn into a hideous addiction, though.

getting used to steering aircraft on the ground with pedals is going to take a while. i’m so used to regular flight sticks with twist rudder that at first, i ended up trying to drive the plane like a car. after messing around for a bit, i got much better. well, marginally better, at least.

i’ve also been debating whether i want to buy a tivo hd or not. at present, we’ve got a buggy, slow, hot-running, unreliable dvr that we rent from comcast for like $15 (soon to be $20) a month. initial purchase of a tivo would be $200, but it would be my hardware and the total cost of renting the multistream cablecard from comcast + tivo service would be roughly $14. that’s $6 a month (and some taxes) that i wouldn’t be spending. on the other hand, however, we wouldn’t have access to on-demand (which rarely works correctly anyway) and getting cablecards from comcast is a big fucking hassle. damn it.