Cat /proc/cpuinfo or don't trust your cores to rackspace part i

The Planet/EV1, which was my choice when hosting in the US earlier was quite a bit cheaper, but service there was absolutely terrible.

It got to the point where I reprogrammed the DRAC cards to lock out their sys admins.

After The Planet took over we had all kinds of issues, then finally they had an explosion in a transformer in one of their datacenters taking down all of our stuff for days on end. After that we moved out.

They said it had nothing to do with them and we would be credited for the downtime if we stayed for at least another 6 months, but we had by then already signed up elsewhere and restored from backups. I figure if you're willing to run your operation that close to the red line then we should be taking our business elsewhere. They were lucky nobody got hurt.

Right now we're hosting in three places, leaseweb, mojohost and virtual acccess. VXS is by far the best but expensive, leaseweb is somewhere in the middle and for high volume mojohost is absolutely unbeatable.

btw, you have me curious what else you've heard rackspace called :)

With both mojohost and leaseweb I basically only bug them when there are network or hardware issues, for the rest the problems are mine. VXS is a different story, that's where all the web servers are, their operators help with warding off all kinds of attacks, proactively scan for security issues and so on. 24x7 cell phone of the manager of the hosting facility.

It's very addictive, that level of service.

They charge a pretty penny for it, but imo it's worth it, it is still much cheaper than having a full time sysadmin for our stuff, and they probably do a better job of it.

If you're using "spidey-sense" to determine the underperforming elements in your software stack...

There are a number of uncomfortable ideas in this article.

As for the tone, you may disagree with that but that does not distract from the fact that if you operate a business, that you should know your stuff.

And if you outsource something you should at least know how to check up on the bits that you've outsourced.

Outsourcing does not mean that your responsibility disappears, it simply changes from 'doing' to 'monitoring'.

Maybe rackspace did not do their job, I have no insight in the communications that went on between the party involved and rackspace.

All we get here is a pointing finger without any responsibility taken, that is not a realistic picture.

It could be the difference in the wording of the upgrade request ("please install another CPU in our machine" vs "please install and configure another CPU in our machine").

Even then, rackspace probably should get part of the blame, but really not all of it. The fact that the situation persisted for two years is completely on the OPs account, in two years you have many more opportunities than your hosting provider to find this out, after all they will leave your machine alone unless it malfunctions and there is no indication that they ever were requested to look in to this, and when they were they actually found the problem.

I quote from the article "In investigating an unrelated issue, we followed up with Rackspace on a Kernel patch that couldn’t be applied to our server. One of the technicians immediately realized why – we were not running the SMP kernel."

How come someone is trying to patch a kernel, can't apply the patch and then still doesn't clue in to the situation ?

Also, we do not know if the SMP kernel was installed or not, it might have been, and then on the final reboot the wrong kernel was brought up. And that's a very easy mistake to make.

But dmesg would tell you in a heartbeat, as would 'top '1'', which you would be using plenty of times while debugging performance issues to make sure all your cores are doing the right amount of work.

For one thing, my understanding of Rackspace's business practices -- and I've only dealt with them peripherally, so I might be a bit wrong here -- is that they "manage" things like their network, and the actual server hardware, and stuff like that. So, if you want a CPU upgrade, sure, they'll do that. If you need your server rebooted, they'll do that too. But, they don't have anyone sitting there monitoring your system's performance metrics and doing your sysadmin duties for you.

The way I read it, Rackspace did do their job: they upgraded the hardware. It was up to the server admin -- not Rackspace -- to check that the software was then configured correctly.

And finally, I don't generally agree with statements of the form, "If you don't know X, you shouldn't be doing Y", but ... looking at dmesg and top are both really, really, really standard sysadmin operations. Entry level stuff, really. Sysadmin work doesn't just mean messing around with Apache's configuration; there are many more nuances, and it's likely that their system is vulnerable to problems that they don't even know about.