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The CalPop fun continues..

So, today I had another experience in the vein of the ‘CalPop = worst ISP ever’ post. I haven’t been writing all of these up – a few months ago we couldn’t get into our cabinet for over a hour because no one knew where the key was, for example – I finally had to take the doors of the cabinet off their hinges. But today’s was a crowning CalPop moment – worthy even of some of the things we used to do at Epoch. And I’ve carefully avoided explaining about the day I showed up to install and discovered there wasn’t a drop and no one knew what a crossover cable was. Today’s was a totally different experience, though.

I arrived with 3 more servers to be installed in our quarter cabinet. Since the cabinet is empty except for us and two other servers, both fairly low powered machines, and this would make a total of 5 servers for us, it didn’t occur to me to worry about power issues – so I happily plugged in and turned on. Things looked like they were going well until I plugged in the monitor from the crash cart, and then suddenly the entire rack went dark. Hm, thought I, and I checked the powerstrip breaker. Nope, closed. Then I went over and asked CalPop to reset the feeder breaker. Turns out they can’t – because we’re in the side that they lease from XO – and no one is answering the door at XO, or the phone. So no reset. They move us to a new circuit – at which point I discover why all the trouble. It wasn’t just us on that circuit – it was us and the cabinet next door – 10 1U servers, among other things. 😉

Now, you could make a good case that all of this could happen to anyone, and I agree with that. I even remember once at Epoch where we had a power outage caused by a cleaning lady vacuuming the server room. (Yes, I’m sure this happens all the time).  But it still has this sort of feel of we’re not quite sure what we’re doing to it 😉

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “The CalPop fun continues..”

  1. sheer_panic Says:
    September 16th, 2009 at 1:59 am

    Actually.. I would like to make the counterargument that for me, CalPop may be the best ISP ever.

    They’re probably not the place for your uberprofessional web site – but for hosting a personal server, they’ve got several advantages.

    1) They will sell you parts at reasonable prices. I bought a ethernet card from them when QM’s failed.
    2) They’re friendly and enjoyable to hang around.
    3) The CalPopIsms are actually *very funny*, once you get used to them. They add a little bit of chaos to life, and remind one not to take this too seriously.. I mean, it’s only a web server..

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