Customers never cease to amaze me.

[autographedcat]

I don't usually post about work, but this was too good not to share...

Toward the end of today, I got a message from one of my team members, asking about one of the old web servers, which had been slated for decommission..

Him: Is uuweb1 still there
Me: Uh, well, we turned it off, but it still exists
Him: Can we access it?
Me (suspicious): Why?

Well, it turns out that one of the customers who was hosted on that machine had not been properly transitioned over to the new web servers. This is an oversight, and entirely our fault, so I can understand the customer's demand that we produce his content.

Luckily, we hadn't yet recycled the hardware, and I drug it out of storage and set it up on my bench with the idea of temporarily putting it up on a test IP long enough to discover if the customers content was still there.

And it occurred to me...

This machine was turned off. It was off the network.

What kind of web customer doesn't NOTICE that their website is down for two months????

Incredible.

(We were able to recover the customers data for them, so alls well that ends well, but I commented to my boss that if we didn't have their stuff, it would serve 'em right. Sheesh!)

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

What web customers? Me, for a start. I would notice on the rare occasions I update it (usually when I've modified my software to a new release) that the FTP access wasn't working, but between those times I rarely look at my websites. I don't think I've looked at my one in Fremont CA for a year or so, or the one at firedrake (they are mirrors of the others).

But since the masters are all on my machine at home, it doesn't much matter to me if one of the others goes down, it's why I have several of them scattered geographically (I must get one in Australia or NZ at some point). Offsite backups, /very/ offsite...