japan.narnarnar.com

Nar3: Japan

Stupid superuser...
Posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2004 at 2:35am by Brett.
(Saturday, March 6th, 2004 at 4:35pm Japanese Standard Time)

Superuser.net sucks. We have been hosted on their servers for nearly 4 years, and their quality of service has been, shall we say, less than decent.

We were often unable to contact anyone from superuser for months at a time. Many services magically stopped working with out notice, and very rarely did we receive replies to our emails. But we tolerated it. Why? Because it was cheap. No other place we could find would offer the features we had for the cost.

Recently, however, it became obvious a change of hosts was in order.

Around the middle of February the image galleries stopped working completely. I sent an email to superuser's support, which was promptly ignored. I waited 5 days, and send another.

If you care to read these emails--and I suggest you do--they can be found here.


Read them? Jerk, isn't he?

There is an additional email that was never sent. It wasn't sent for a couple reasons. First, Jason stole my thunder. Dang him for living in the same time zone as our host...DANG HIM, I say!!! Secondly, "Derek" (for whom I now have a sort of...pet name, if you will) still has control of the content of our site. I don't want narnarnar.com pointing to whatever he may dream up, so until I can access our registrar's database to change our nameserver, I don't want to give him a reason to make narnarnar.com point to Bad Things.

Here is the email I would have sent:

You do have quite a talent for staring determinedly at the ground while
The Point flies far over your head. Makes a nice sort of "whoosh"
sound, doesn't it?

Again, I will say that I refer to your lack of communicating *any*
information to the clients, not the actions you took to secure the
server. I did not email the developer who wrote the software because he
was not that one who completely restricted my access to the code when
merely restricting the web server's access would have been acceptable.
You may want to 'man chmod' at some point to see how to do this.

Every major application has had exploitable code at one time in its
development. It is *impossible* to check for all possible exploits as
either a software author or user. Yes, it is the users' responsibility
to check the code, but you are seriously mistaken if you expect perfectly
secure code to be used at all time on your servers. Unknown security flaws
exist in every application...That's the 'unknown' bit. The security you
attempt is impossible, and absolute security nothing but an delusional
concept.

As for terminating my account, I am way ahead of you, and will be glad
to be rid of your "services," which have been more than insufficient. You
have been rude, condescending, and elusive, and this is unacceptable
behavior for any human, but *especially* for a "business."

You will charge for the final month of service, at which time our
business relationship shall be severed.

I do wish you the best of luck with your other clients.
Brett Profitt

Note that only our business relationship is severed...I'm going to go on thinking this guy is a great idiot, thank you very much.

Now, I may never send this email...I don't know. But, if a concerned reader of my site comes along, what am I to do to stop him (or her...yay PC) from sending a very similiar letter? Not much could be done, really...hrm...Mind, the concerned reader would probably wait until we transfer hosts before anything...because said concerned reader wouldn't want my grandmother, who innocently wanted to go to narnarnar.com, ending up somewhere...urm...else.