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The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

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Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#121

Post by Swizec »

teekert wrote: post #55
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would a "use this slide at your own risk" sign be enough to prevent any lawsuits?

This is so a US thing. In my country an adult is just expected to be able to look at a slide, judge it as dangerous, have te freedom to do it anyway, receive medial help if needed, feel the shame, experienced a learning moment. Get laughed at, Laugh about it. In the US there is always a lawsuit and it's someone's fault. It always feels like a not-so-nice place to be. Then again it makes for great lawyer and medical s…

> In the US there is always a lawsuit and it's someone's fault

When I broke my arm, the insurance company explicitly asked “Can we sue someone for this?”

No damn it, do your job! I pay insurance so insurance can pay for shit like this.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#122

Post by quags »

swozey wrote: post #110
Hippocrates wrote: post #50

My company used Rackspace back in 2013. It was my first gig where I was "managing servers" and "deploying to production". The rest of the team was as inexperienced as I was. We paid extra for the support services that entitled us to unlimited 24/7 human support. Whenever I was stuck on an issue with deploying, scaling, crashing etc. my boss would say "try calling support." Initially you'd get a first-line operator bu…

I used to be one of those phone answering sysadmins for a specific customer revenue. I think that job gave me phone anxiety. Every single different call was some new destroyed system by someone who had no idea what they were doing, hacked systems, unplanned migrations, whiteboarding-in-your-brain architecture discussions, etc. The other webhosts I worked at would never put an admin on the phone with a customer direct…

Thank you for your service.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#123

Post by bravetraveler »

JCM9 wrote: post #46

Yet another example of why you should run for the hills (as a customer or employee) if a private equity firm buys a business.

No joke, starting in the Linux administration field I felt cursed. My first three employers were acquired by investment groups and quickly run into the ground

First Hostgator, then Rackspace, the third... not sure I want to say

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#124

Post by sredevops »

tristor wrote: post #120
sredevops wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right before they went public, they started to outsource a lot of their support. It looked like lipstick on a pig.

There was never any support outsourced while I was there from 2010-2014. They originally went public in 2008. That is just not true. Everyone in support sat physically in an office other than a few very senior folks that worked from home. Most were in San Antonio, some were in Austin, some in London, a few folks for LATAM were in Mexico City and Costa Rica, and folks for the BENELUX team were in Amsterdam. We also ha…

I stand corrected. I guess when it went private, it got outsourced.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#125

Post by bravetraveler »

acdha wrote: post #104
rrdharan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.

One thing to remember is that norms changed over time. In the 90s and 2000s it was pretty widely accepted that a sysadmin could access customer data pretty easily and that trust was basically factored into the relationship. Over time and various scandals our expectations have changed but there's definitely a generational divide here.

Not to detract from the paradigm shift, it is very true... but this is also more of an 'upsell' now.

Providers generally don't want this access, but they'll accept it - and your money

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#127

Post by acdha »

bravetraveler wrote: post #125
acdha wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember is that norms changed over time. In the 90s and 2000s it was pretty widely accepted that a sysadmin could access customer data pretty easily and that trust was basically factored into the relationship. Over time and various scandals our expectations have changed but there's definitely a generational divide here.

Not to detract from the paradigm shift, it is very true... but this is also more of an 'upsell' now. Providers generally don't want this access, but they'll accept it - and your money

It's a compliance requirement in certain fields, too, so someone asking for it is a reliable way to tell that they're probably less cost-discriminatory.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#128

Post by bravetraveler »

acdha wrote: post #127
bravetraveler wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to detract from the paradigm shift, it is very true... but this is also more of an 'upsell' now. Providers generally don't want this access, but they'll accept it - and your money

It's a compliance requirement in certain fields, too, so someone asking for it is a reliable way to tell that they're probably less cost-discriminatory.

Fair point!

I should have realized this was relevant and included it... that's been eating a fair bit of our time lately.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#129

Post by julianlam »

debarshri wrote: post #98
rrdharan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems pretty sketchy from a data access perspective.

You will be surprised how much digitalocean has access in your cloud infra. We had a support ticket, the support person could see all our pods, namespace and kubernetes objects, disk mounts etc.

How is that a surprise? They quite literally have physical access to your VPS (even if not easily).

All the things you mentioned are simple metadata available via query.

If things went really sideways on one of my servers, and I could not manage to get back in (even with their 3-4 alternative methods), I fully expect DigitalOcean to be able to log in and restore access, and charge me for the privilege.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#130

Post by debarshri »

julianlam wrote: post #129
debarshri wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will be surprised how much digitalocean has access in your cloud infra. We had a support ticket, the support person could see all our pods, namespace and kubernetes objects, disk mounts etc.

How is that a surprise? They quite literally have physical access to your VPS (even if not easily). All the things you mentioned are simple metadata available via query. If things went really sideways on one of my servers, and I could not manage to get back in (even with their 3-4 alternative methods), I fully expect DigitalOcean to be able to log in and restore access, and charge me for the privilege.

Question is how would you know the support engineer who has access to your stuff and can log you in is not a bad actor.
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