The last week has been an amazing nightmare.

Here are the facts:

1. The T1 was scheduled to go offline at the end of the month. We knew this was going to happen, and were planning to move our servers to a new location. (Frankly, we couldn't afford the line, which was costing us $1400 USD / month.)


2. The T1 was actually shut down on Thursday morning, at the end of our monthly billing period with Sprint. This was a horrible surprise.


3. They wouldn't bring the line back up for a few days, without an agreement for continued service. However, they TWICE told me that they would "probably" be able to bring the line back up for the weekend only to help us make a smoother transition, and then on Friday afternoon they finally told me that it wasn't going to happen.


4. With the line down, all DNS, email, and web servers were offline. Also, my own access to email and web was offline. This was a double-whammy: all of our customers now had no access to their Conversant sites, and I had no way to let them know what was going on.


5. Monday, the servers were delivered to the new hosting location. This took the ENTIRE day, as the hosting service is more than an hour from Macrobyte (we're not in a great location, there are no bandwidth facilities around here).


6. Tuesday, with drip-drip-drip (dial-up 56K modem) access to the 'net restored here, I was able to start making changes to the DNS records.


7. At about midnight (between Tues. and Wed.) the DNS changes started propogating. This is why you were able to come here and post your message, and why I didn't post a message immediately: I was asleep when it happened.


8. The mail server STILL isn't up and running.

We're entirely focused on setting up our newest server (except for writing this letter), which is a combined static-web/mail/list server, but our unique requirements have made this a much more complicated job than we expected. We thought it would be working last night, but it now appears that it will take the rest of today to kick it into action.

Lyle, I know you're upset and frustrated, and I don't blame you. But for every ounce of frustration you've felt and are feeling, I promise you that I'm feeling it too. In fact, I think it's safe to say that I'm as frustrated and upset as all of our users, combined.

I don't blame anybody who wants to leave, but I hope you don't. Please, even if you go, accept my apologies.

This feels like Macrobyte has been hit by a truck: we're still alive, but we were in a coma for a week. We did everything we could to get the lights back on as quickly as possible, but there have been a lot of difficulties along the way.

There's a lot more to say, but frankly I think my time is better spent bringing services back online. I'll explain more a little later, after some more of our services are back up and running.

Sincerely,

Seth Dillingham