Stargazer

还记得在高中和大学的两次军训中，每天被欺软怕硬的教官们折腾完之后都不能马上回去休息 - 原因就是总有那么一个在学校里无所事事的老师腆着肚子要给我们“讲评一下”以巩固虐待成果 - 虽然唯一的成效就是提醒我们究竟谁才是最缺练的人以及为他的亲属（尤以母亲和伯父为甚）赢得无数热情的问候。

 

明天就要回村了，而我现在打算讲评一下的那刚刚度过的6个星期显然与之前提到的经历有着天壤之别。但我与之前提到的总结者居然产生了一个共同点 - 本人的肚子已经在救生圈的基础上又摞了一只汽车轮胎，并且所有牛仔裤都扣不上了。（忽略那个“居然”，其实我一点都不感到惊讶） 这从一个侧面反映出我这段日子的愉快。

 

其实自从留学以来我的饭量已经是直线跳水，所以我体重上的成就基本应该属于心宽体胖。家里的感觉很亲切。北京的天虽然经常不是晴朗的天，但我心里好喜欢。用bon jovi的话说，这里是 the only one place they call me one of their own. 父母和亲人们永远都那么无条件的“纵容”着我，朋友间气氛总是那么轻松随意，说话可以完全不走脑子。用很姚明的方式说就是“这是我的城市”。家里也有变得陌生的地方。大街上来全国甚至全世界的朋友越来越多，数量甚至超过了土著，北京在开放发展的同时也在丢失着那份朴素的京味儿（其实整个中国又何尝不是这样），而南锣鼓巷之类所谓的京味儿总觉得有种做作的味道 - 无意冒犯欣赏者们，但是试想如果北京能用50条06年以前那稍嫌冷清的南锣鼓巷来替代现在充斥着满世界洋文洋酒真洋人和假洋鬼子的commercial胡同。。我也就是瞎想，其实要真那样儿没准儿效果会更糟。

 

每次都是说着说着就不知道自己想说的是什么了。当年刚开始写blog的时候还很理科生的细细的把日志分成好几类，结果这几年的趋势就是用得到的分类越来越少，最后连日志都不怎么写了。。（细心的读者朋友此时应该发现我巧妙地在此处呼应了上一篇日志的开头） 现在我打算结束本篇日志了，因为身后电视中马琳疲软的表现把我本来就毫无逻辑的思维彻底打乱。各位朋友们咱们过两天网上再见，不上网的咱们明年见！

 

Adam Lambert - Satisfaction

Allison Iraheta - Alone

X Factor 2008 终于落下帷幕了。Alexandra 拔得头筹可以说毫无争议。如果说前年冠军Leona Lewis是英国的Mariah Carey和Whitney Houston的结合体的话，那这次的Alex就是英国的Beyonce. 她和Beyonce在决赛里合唱的一首Listen真是很精彩啊（要是她能不那么过度激动就更好了）。

 

在贴三位决赛选手的比赛视频之前，我觉得应该把一个更精彩的放上来——从2003年第一届X Factor以来很多非常经典的奇形怪状的海选选手被邀请来和唱了一首<I have a dream>，震慑全场，连主持都成他们为national treasure。（开场之前有过去5年海选的回放，真是超兽大聚会。。）

 

James Morrison feat. Nelly Furtado - Broken String (Delivery boy 都这么有才。。)

Lemar - If she knew (听过英国的R&B以后不得不感叹天下老黑一个声。。)

11月14日BBC在central London的演播大厅,卡迪夫还有贝尔法斯特举办了一年一度的旨在帮助残疾儿童的慈善晚会Children in need。 晚会的形式其实挺像国内的赈灾晚会，各个机构单位都举着巨大的支票等着露脸。但是个人感觉比较好的是整个活动有个特别lovely的形象大使：Pudsey - 一个用花布绑着一只眼睛的小熊。

 

从十月初全国各地的玩具店就能买到，收入当然也会捐给慈善机构。还有就是不管出于真心还是作秀，这次活动确实能体现every penny helps的意思。很多人举着的支票只有几百镑，但是那种全国同心的氛围真挺好。（不过没我什么事儿，呵呵。）

 

这种国家电视台举办的晚会自然少不了大腕儿，但是我觉得节目的亮点是很多在英国热播的电视剧的剧组人员拍摄的childen in need特别版音乐短剧。下面就是几个我觉得比较精彩的：

 

首先是Eastender剧组。这个剧说的是生活在伦敦东区的居民的故事，到几天已经在BBC播出了23年，获奖无数，可谓长盛不衰。

google一篇gentoo wiki的文章以后却发现文章不见了，取而代之的是这么一条message:

“Gentoo-Wiki recently had it's database lost; this is the rewrite of the site. Please visit the Main Page to see how you can help. ”

 

去main page看了看full story,敢情事情是这样的。。（节选几条重要的）

 

What's Happening?

At approximately 1:00 AM October 17th both websites went down. heres what i know:

Saturday, October 18th 10:19AM EST

when the server went down at first I dident think anything was wrong with the site. I attempted to call Skiplink (my server provider) to find out if anything was wrong. They dident answer, but it was 1 AM, so i left it for the time being.

The next day In the morning the server still was not up, so I gave them another call, they did not answer. It was at this point I noticed that my 2nd server (same company, different carrier, different physical rack) was also not up. And I this is where i start panicking... the 2nd server was the backups for the first.

I have emailed, txt'd, phoned (5 different numbers) and I have yet to get ahold of anyone. If anyone knows anyone that works at http://www.56marietta.com, this is the building where the servers are housed.. could you get them to find out if anything is going on there and shoot me an email. I would REALLY appreciate it.

I'll go freak out on my own now and update this page whenever I find out anything new.

P.S. come back for updates if i have any.

Mike Valstar mikevalstar@gmail.com

Sunday, October 19th 7:10PM EST

No word from skiplink today, They are being very unprofessional and this is pissing me off. I will be moving the servers ASAP once i get them back up at skiplink so that i can move the date.

Right now it looks like i'm going to move to Amazon EC2. this looks to be the best solution and should in theory actually reduce my costs monthly by a couple hundred dollars. and if i can later set it up to start and kill servers at peak times i should be able to save a little more again.

All this aside I have definitely learned the use of off-site backups. once the servers are moved I will be adding in some backup scripts to send the backups around the world. I'll have some stats of what I would need for backups later and ask around to see if anyone would be willing to host backups.

Wednesday, October 22nd 7:00AM EST

Where We Stand:
well another somewhat sleepless night but... I have gotten into a little bit of a "talk" with skiplink via text message to his cell phone. and I have talked to a couple of people at TelX (they have been very helpful). as it stands here is my options:

1. Pay to power up the entire cage for a few hours (I would pay TelX for this), however I'm 99% sure skiplink has terminated his outside lines.
2. Give TelX the serial numbers (or something identifyable) about the servers; they would go in and borrow them is i sign a waiver. (however skiplink refuses to give me such information)
3. Pay TelX to turn on each box with a monitor handy to check the command prompt to look for my internal server names.
4. Wait 120 days until they can legally repo the servers and claim mine

Obviously option #2 is the best, and I'm convincing skiplink to allow me to do this (e.g. give me something identifiable about the servers). #3 is another, albeit expensive option, however would put me at risk of potentially damaging other peoples servers and being held liable. and #4 would be my fall back option of last resort. these seem to be my only options short of hiring a lawyer to help with #2.

I'd like to talk the staff at TelX for being very helpful and professional about the whole thing. Hopefully Skiplink will get back to me with some serial numbers soon. once again i'll keep you all posted; and thanks again for everyones support.

P.S. a couple people have suggested a 5th option of hiring Ninjas and/or Pirates to retrieve the data... I'll work on that.'

Thursday, October 23rd 10:00PM EST

At this time I'm going to have to call the former site a loss. I'll post shortly on what will come next.

You guys can stop harassing Skiplink now, thanks for the sentiment though

If I were to sum up in one word why it has come to this it would be SPITE.

The full story: I have left out bits and pieces of the story so far because I did not want to sound mean to anyone who may or may not help me in the future and may be reading this (Hi Robert). However it has come to a point where I am on my own with little recourse; so I might as well tell everything I know. The story I have pieced together from people at TelX, emails form people in the building, people at 55 Marietta (Skiplink's new building) and other people who just know things.

It all began a while ago, TelX at 56 Marietta in Atlanta was overcharging Skiplink for space and hydro. Skiplink did what I would have done and decided to move (to 55 Marietta), to get the serves out quick. After moving a decent portion of his servers to the new facility TelX noticed and decided to extort some more money out of him before he left. Skiplink would of course not pay the extortion money so TelX shut off his cage and locked him out of the building.

At this point I come into the story and find my servers turned off. After several days of attempting to contact Skiplink via cell phone, office phone, text message, email, and IM my frustration grew. I had already restored most of my clients DNS and whatever backups I had available on to other servers and I was getting nowhere with Skiplink. Seeing as I was already starting to get a few emails from some resourceful googlers ad put up this temporary site. Emails rolled in with offers of support and help (thanks BTW) and a few emails with bits and pieces of information to tide me over.

Skiplink finally texted me with some minimal information, I basically took it as a "fuck you you're not important enough to warrant warning or details of what is going on". With that I at least hoped he was moving his servers, mine was just last on the list. Oh I was last on the list, but I wasent being moved; <Rant>I guess paying the equivalent of my mortgage in servers every month dosent make me important</Rant>. I received an email from some helpful users that gave me the information in the 1st paragraph so I called TelX.

TelX was somewhat helpful and was willing to accommodate me getting back my data (Skiplink would later call it extortion). They were willing to hook my machine up to a network and let me copy things off, or power up the entire cage and hope for the best. this would have cost me a bit of money but I and some of my clients would have gladly paid it. However i had gleaned at this point that Skiplink had already turned off the outside networks to the cage so powering it up would be useless. But I still had the option of hooking up the boxes directly, if i only knew which were mine.

After about a day and a half of pleading to Skiplink to give me something identifiable about the servers he refused saying "No they will not [power up the servers], we are in dispute with amounts owed". Adding "This has to be handled properly via appropriate channels." I asked further about getting some info about the servers and was told "Again it is all our equipment... You will have to wait on removal of your euipment". There was no more texting for a while and I got no more information out of skiplink for days.

This morning I finally chatted with Skiplink over IM and reiterated my request that he allow me to access my data via TelX as proxy. Skiplink was very adamant that the hardware was his and that TelX could not touch it. I informed him that they have said otherwise and would allow me access to the servers (for a fee) if i could determine which servers were mine. Skiplink went over the legal-ness of this with me, said TelX was extorting him and now me, telx has no right to hold his property, and in essence said that he would not help me. He also made it clear that he will not personally sue to get the equipment, or pay the fee of $25,000 TelX says he owes to retrieve the equipment. His last ditch effort was to send someone who had a collocated box on floor 2 to retrieve it and hope he was allowed onto floor 8 with my servers (and other peoples). I have not heard anything from him as of yet and can only assume he has failed.

And that brings us to today, October 23rd and exactly 1 week after the servers went down. To summarize my serves are in limbo, I have little legal recourse as I am in canada and don't actually own any physical property in this case. Skiplink will not tell me which servers are mine simply to spite TelX for wronging him. The wiki had no recent backups ( I have a backup of the content but not the users or other data from March thanks to a helpful user ). Gentoo-Portage I have a full code base backup, but none of the user content. and lastly I am exhausted from lack of sleep.

Final Rant: Skiplink is acting childish, has been completely unprofessional about the whole matter, and has been an ass about the whole thing. They should have told me what happened the day it happened, not a few text messages and a full explanation a full 1 week later. I will NEVER recommend their services to anyone, and will actively encourage current users to move their servers elsewhere.

Thanks to everyone who has emailed me over the past week, you have kept me from going completely insane and I thank you whole heartedly. The wiki will be back, it will be better stronger and most importantly properly backed up (my plan for moving forward will come in the next hour or so).

P.S. to the other people with servers stuck with mine and have emailed me. I feel for you and I will keep this space updated with as much info as I can.

Mike Valstar - Apologizing to everyone for not having off-site backups in place.