Mike Hillyer’s Personal Webspace

So what happened? Well, two days ago I noticed connection issues while trying to create a blog post on MySQL’s new enterprise offering (more on that later). I sent in a support request to Tera-Byte, my colocation provider. After a while I checked and noticed that I could connect via SSH, but that the server was rejecting my private key and my password.This had me concerned so I called Tera-Byte and asked what was happening. Turns out that they had mistakenly deleted my virtual private server. But they were kind enough to not only increase my new virtual private server’s memory from 360 megs to 512, but also credit me one month’s fees. I was in shock at this news and thanked the tech for the upgrade and refund and hung up.After I got off the phone I skipped past the denial and bargaining stages of grief and arrived at anger. So, calling Tera-Byte back up to ask how exactly this could happen. I had a different fellow on the line the second time who was not apologetic and who explained to me that their main Ensim control panel reported that my virtual machine was corrupt. They assumed that as it was corrupt I must not have any data on it and therefore wiped and replaced it. So the mistake has been replaced by procedure in this version.

I informed the person on the line that it would have been reported corrupt because I had no Ensim control panel on my virtual machine thanks to this exchange:

Me:

One more question: what distro is the virtual machine? Are there any gotchas when customizing it? I like to run my own builds of Apache, PHP and MySQL, and I’m not a big control panel fan. Are there any processes that must keep running for the virtual machine to survive?

Dave Rowlands of Tera-Byte:

It would be Fedora Core, um, 2, I believe, rinning Apache 2, mysql 3.23.58 (we can upgrade that officially to 4.1.18, but not higher as yet), and mysql 4.3.10.

You have the ability to install pretty much whatever you want in there, but be aware that once you start messing with what’s defaulted onto it, we can no longer offer support.

Me:

Sounds fine, just needed to know if killing any of the ensim control panel would bring down the virtual machine is all.

Dave Rowlands of Tera-Byte Support:

Not that I’m aware of, no.

Well Dave, it seems that while removing the control panel did not actually cause corruption or crashing, as this was a virtual machine, it did cause Tera-Byte to erroneously identify my machine as corrupted and therefore caused the people at Tera-Byte to bring my machine down in a very permanent way.

In any case the guy on the other end of the phone would not take responsibility and I told him to convert my credit to a refund and cancel my account. My warning to future users of Tera-Byte, or at least their Virtual Server offering, is to look elsewhere.

I am the unfortunate victim of my own procrastination, as I put off setting up a backup system for the virtual server and now find myself with no blog. VBMySQL.com is also offline, but I have a backup copy that was made in July when I left MySQL AB. The backup is from before I switched content management systems, but I should be able to gradually restore it to its former glory, minus a few forum posts.

In the meantime, please try a Google cache of any page you are missing, and if you have any cached copies of pages you consider important, feel free to send them my way.

At the end of the day you have to tell yourself that’s it’s just bits and bytes and life goes on.