While talking with the technician I was informed that at 6 P.M. they were going to be releasing any pre-ordered iPhone 4 S’ that had not been picked up and that the line was starting by the door.  At this point it was only 5:15 PM so I walked to the outer door to find that I was only second in line.  I chatted with the person in front of me whom was a very nice woman and over the next 30 minutes the line behind me grew quite quickly up to about 45 individuals.

One of the Apple Store representatives came out and started at the beginning of the line asking us what flavor of the iPhone 4 S we wanted (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB), and I was disappointed to hear that I likely would not get my hands on a 64 GB Black AT&T iPhone 4 S.  My, now previous, 32 GB iPhone 4 was getting full with only around 1 GB of free space so I was looking forward to upgrading.

At around 6:30 PM the Apple store representatives actually started pulling us in one at a time to sell us our devices and to my surprise they had one 64 GB Black AT&T iPhone 4 S which I quickly snapped up.  Overall I will be honest that I did not expect much of an improved experience but overall so far I am absolutely loving Siri and the iPhone 4 S.  The phone itself feels a bit snappier, although the iPhone 4 itself was already quite fast but the selling point for me is Siri.

On my 45 minute drive home I found myself using Siri to communicate with friends via text without ever having to actually look at what they said or type a single letter myself.  I’ve also found it’s extremely accurate at understanding my voice and I’ve found myself using it to enter more and more data as I’ve been using the phone.  I have to say, Siri alone, is a valid reason to move from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 4 S.

At the end of the day, I wish it was an iPhone 5 with a larger screen as well as a laundry list of other upgrade and feature requests, but I can honestly say I am happy with my iPhone 4 S.

Now there are two feature requests, that I would really love to see integrated into iOS for iPhone/iPad:

1. The ability to have a custom tone for emails based upon email ID. (i.e. from=”thewife@comcast.net” sound=”something custom”).
2. The ability to set a custom tone or contact to over-ride silence.

Comcast Bill showing $50 "Unbilled Activity"

Let me first begin by saying that I’ve had Comcast Internet and Television service for well over 4 years and for the most part I’ve been satisfied with the service itself.  I’ve rarely had to use customer service as generally I’ve not had issues with any of my services and when I did for the most part Comcast fixed those issues in a timely fashion.  I’m not entirely sure what has changed over the last year or so, but things have gone seriously down hill when it comes to customer service.  I’m going to do my absolute best to detail exactly what happened, how it happened, and why it happened so that you can hopefully make an informed decision as to whether you wish to go with Comcast, to continue your existing Comcast service, or to shift to/choose another provider.

On September 27th, 2010 my wife and I moved in to our new apartment a couple of minutes away from our old apartment and we had previously called to schedule Comcast to come out and perform a transfer of service to get our DVR Box and our Cable box online in our new apartment.  Comcast came out and performed the transfer of service free of charge and since we were moving into a larger apartment we opted to go ahead and get another digital box for one of our bedrooms while we were at it.  The technician that came out explained to me that this was his first installation where he was on his own and apologized ahead of time if it took longer than we expected.  I told the technician that I understood and that it wasn’t an issue.

The technician did what he needed to do including making the connection in the junction box at the back of the apartment building, cutting and putting ends on coaxial cables for our DVR, Cable Modem, and Digital Box, and installing a splitter for the DVR and Cable box.  The technician tested the line for the DVR and the cable modem and everything seemed to be working well so he went into the bedroom for the new digital box.  The digital box was having some issues and displaying an error code so he powered the box off and back on and it appeared to work fine so he finished up his paperwork and left.

About a week went by before we had a chance to use the cable box in the bedroom and when we turned on the TV it was giving the same error code it did at the original installation prompting me to call Comcast and have them come out to take a look at the box.  A technician came out the next week and at first glance he said that the cable box was dead and went ahead and swapped it out for a brand new box and told me that the issue would be resolved.  I tested the box myself and was pleased to see that the box was indeed working as it should.  The technician finished his paperwork and left and everything was fine for about a week.

The next week I began seeing 20% to 30% packet loss on my internet connection and I ran numerous tests to Google.com as well as several other sites and servers around the United States and abroad to ensure that it wasn’t something specific to a particular site, switch, router, or network outside of Comcast’s control.  I directly connected the modem to the computer and tested to ensure that it wasn’t the router and I switched out ethernet cables as well to ensure it wasn’t a bad cable however the issue continued.  At this point I determined that something was wrong and it wasn’t my equipment so I called and scheduled for a technician to come out and look into the issue.

The earliest the technician could come out was around four days later which was less than satisfactory as my livelihood requires an internet connection and I had to resort to a cellular 3G connection in the meantime.  Finally once the technician came out he hooked up his tester and made sure that our cables and ends in the wall were in good shape and he informed me that they were and that there didn’t appear to be any issues between the junction box and the wall plate in the wall.  He then proceeded to look over the coaxial cables that the original installer put in place and found that the original installer had failed to properly put the ends on the coaxial cables.  He was rather shocked to see this issue as he said it was a very simple thing to fix and very odd for it to be overlooked when putting ends onto a coaxial cable.  If my memory serves me correctly he said that the original installer neglected to put a seal on the connector, or something similar.

The technician fixed the cable, the one that the original installer brought and installed, and I ran my tests and the packet loss was gone and the signal to the modem was once again excellent.  Everything has been absolutely wonderful from that point until today, when I went to pay my Comcast bill.  I saw that my Comcast bill had $50 in “Unbilled Activity” which you can see by clicking on the thumbnail of the bill at the top of this post.  I had no idea what these charges were for so I called Comcast’s customer service to discuss the charges.

I was connected with a customer service representative who explained that the $50 charge was for the technician to come out to repair the service, and that the issue was with our equipment and not theirs.  The representative even went so far as to say that the installer had replaced a “line drop connector” however when I asked her what a “line drop connector” was she said that she didn’t know and that I would have to get in contact with a technician.  I told the representative that this was unacceptable and that there was no way that I am going to pay a charge for something if they can’t even tell me what the charge was.  I had the call escalated to a supervisor as the customer support representative couldn’t adequately explain the charge.

I was connected with a supervisor and she explained to me that it was to replace a connector in the face plate on the wall which didn’t happen and yes, they’re charging me $50 for a $0.50 connector.  I told the supervisor what the technician did when he came out, that he said it was indeed an installation error, and that it was a simple fix and that the technician told me that I would not be charged for the visit.  The supervisor said that it was a legitimate charge and that there was nothing that she could do about it.  At this point I was becoming extremely frustrated and I asked to be escalated to the next level supervisor at which point the individual told me that management did not take phone calls and that there was essentially nothing more that I could do.

I asked the supervisor to transfer me to another supervisor hoping that I would get a hold of somebody with a real sense of customer service and would at the very least get me to somebody who could resolve the issue, or advise me on how to further pursue the issue to get it resolved in a timely fashion.  The next supervisor that I spoke with on the phone simply told me that it was against company policy to escalate a phone call any further and that all they could do was escalate it on their end, but didn’t explain to me what that entailed or what to expect.  The supervisor even went so far as to actually say that he agreed with me that in this particular case this was an extreme lack of quality customer service but he told me that there was literally nothing more that he could do to help me.

Essentially it comes down to the fact that the original installer that was contracted by Comcast to install my service in the new apartment failed to do so correctly and I’m now being billed for the incompetence of the original installer.  When contacting Comcast customer service I’m being told that the technician that fixed the issue put a code down that caused me to be billed and since it was a legitimate code that there is nothing that they can do to waive the charge.  If Comcast doesn’t in some way, shape, or form let me know that they really do appreciate me as a customer and tell me that they are going to make this situation right, at the least, I’m going to look into alternate providers for my services.

My business is growing at a decent pace and I’m looking at opening a physical office location for my employees to work out of which would have been a Comcast Business connection in addition to the data and TV connections that I currently have in my apartment but at this point it looks as though Comcast is going to be potentially losing out on my future business as well as my current business.  I sincerely hope that Comcast hasn’t grown so large that they don’t care about their individual customers and don’t care if they’re unhappy, receive poor customer service, or simply choose to no longer do business with Comcast due to these reasons.

Comcast: make this right, or I’m going to do my absolute best in every way, shape, and form to make sure that anybody I ever have any interactions with be it business, personal, or otherwise knows exactly about your services, the lack of customer service, and everything that these issues entail.  The ball is in your court, I hope you make the right decision.

At the hosting provider I own we originally started offering Virtual Private Servers late 2008 to address the needs of our clients who were outgrowing shared but didn’t yet want to move to a full-blown dedicated environment.  We did offer VPSs for about 6 months before the HyperVM scare at FsckVPS happened where dozens of VPS nodes were wiped clean and data lost.  We then decided to discontinue HyperVM and worked on migrating our existing VPS clients to other providers we worked with and trusted to be reliable.

The Good

Fast forward to late 2009 when we brought our first new SolusVM VPS server node online.  SolusVM has been an exceptional control panel with a good list of features and while it is missing some basic features such as bandwidth reports, cpu graphs, and memory graphs SolusVM has been working on improving their software over time.  We can handle a few missing “features” as long as we know that those features are in development and will be added.

The administration control panel and the user side of the control panel are very clean and concise while still being very powerful.  The only gripes we originally had with SolusVM was the inability to customize the client side templates and re-brand the solution however they did enable this ability and so far we love the control panel in this aspect.

SolusVM does offer a forum where you can post your questions and issues and receive support from others using the software as well and fairly regularly a SolusVM staff member will also stop by and help out as well.  There is also a support ticket system should you have an issue that is urgent or that does require some privacy.  Our general experiences with SolusVM support over both methods has been fairly good – I wouldn’t go so far as to say great but the support definitely has not been bad.

The Bad

As with any solution the support staff can only support their solution and they cannot support third party issues such as hardware issues with a server, networking issues outside of the VPS system itself, etc…  We understand this however we are facing an issue currently that is indeed a part of the SolusVM control panel ecosystem and yet we’re receiving no support on the matter.

The particular issue we are facing is that no matter what speed we set for individual VPSs in the control panel they are limited to a total limit of around 10 megabit/second transfer speed.  Before contacting SolusVM support we did do some testing to make sure that the server itself was configured correctly and able to transfer at rates up to 100 megabit/second:

[root@boreas ~]# wget http://speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com/downloads/test100.zip
–2010-04-22 17:02:27– http://speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com/downloads/test100.zip
Resolving speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com… 74.86.116.210
Connecting to speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com|74.86.116.210|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 104874307 (100M) [application/zip]
Saving to: `test100.zip’

100%[========================>] 104,874,307 9.55M/s in 9.7s

2010-04-22 17:02:36 (10.3 MB/s) – `test100.zip’ saved [104874307/104874307]

91.4MB/sec transfer

Even with providing this information to SolusVM they responded that they were able to reproduce the issue on our servers but that the problem was not a SolusVM problem and that they could only provide support to the panel itself.  They stated that they could not and would not support issues with our server or network.

We’re quite a bit on the fence with SolusVM due to this lack of basic support.  It’s obvious that the server itself is fully capable of 100megabit speeds and that the networking is fully capable of these speeds as well and yet SolusVM support is telling us that it’s a server or networking issue and that they won’t help.  To be clear the only thing that has been done to this server is that we installed it with a basic CentOS5 installation and then performed the SolusVM installation.

I’ll be sure to update this post once SolusVM does get back to us either letting us know that they are going to help with the issue or that we’re on our own to find another better supported control panel.

Update

It seems that they’re unwilling to help in any way/shape/form which is really unfortunate.  Up until now we’ve had nothing but good things to say about SolusVM and their support but it looks like there isn’t much support available.

Jason from SolusVM support got back to me saying they tested the rate limiting on our servers and that it is working and suggested that we test the feature ourselves.  They also stated that they tested teh speed limiting on their test servers and that it was working fine.  They went even further and said that it was an OpenVZ issue and not an issue with their control panel.  The tech went far enough to say that they are not willing to spend hours of their time investigating the issue when all we really wanted was a bit of effort on their part.

Update Number 2

I let the support tech that I was dealing with, Jason, know about my suspicion of what was causing the issue and I let them know about this post.  My suspicion is that since we are using SoftLayer servers where ETH0 is Private Networking and ETH1 is public instead of ETH0 being public as it is on most servers at most providers that perhaps this was causing issues.

Jason got back to me stating that they will not be blackmailed by a bad review and that he is passing the ticket over to Phill as he is no longer going to respond to the ticket.  Phill did get back to me very quickly (within about 10 minutes)  and hopefully we’ll be able to identify the issue.

Update Number 3

Phill did get back to me letting me know that the traffic shaping is indeed hard-coded to ETH0 and suggested that we either change our public networking to ETH0 or that they perhaps that SolusVM should do public network detection.

From speaking with Phill it seems as though he thought that our issue was that the Traffic Shaping wasn’t properly applying to the VMs and come to find out it’s not but that isn’t our primary issue.  Ultimately there is still the issue that SolusVM hard-codes eth0 into it’s traffic shaping and we’ve uncovered this today.

As for the issues where the VPSs port speeds are dropping for no apparent reason, we’re still working on this for sure.  Hopefully SolusVM support will be willing to assist with this.

Update Number 4

So it seems that SolusVM wanted me to remove any excerpts used from emails/tickets with their support.  I’ve done so as requested.

Update Number 5

Ultimately after finally getting Phill at SolusVM to actually discuss the issue with me he suggested that I drop all traffic shaping rules on the host node.  We did so and amazingly all of the issues disappeared.  This was after hours upon hours of SolusVM saying it wasn’t an issue with their control panel – it turns out that it was actually an issue with the control panel having hard coded eth0 into their traffic shaping settings in their control panel.  Every SoftLayer server uses eth0 as private networking and eth1 as public networking which means that SolusVM’s way of performing traffic shaping simply didn’t work correctly in our environment.

While this does mean that we’re unable to perform any traffic shaping per VPS via SolusVM until they enable the feature to select your primary eth device and that we have to do so manually if we wish to do so – we’d rather have to do some manual work and have it work correctly than to rely on the control panel and have it flawed.  We’ve voiced our opinion in the ticket that SolusVM should give the option to choose an alternate public ethernet device and we’re doing so here as well.

As far as I’m concerned the issue is ultimately resolved but SolusVM does have a long way to go before it gets back to where we would feel comfortable recommending it to our partners and other providers we socially network with.

Getting the server ready to build applications from source:

Check for any RPM installations of the applications.

rpm -qa | grep -i apache
rpm -qa | grep -i httpd
rpm -qa | grep -i php
rpm -qa | grep -i mysql

Remove any RPM installations found with the “rpm -e” command:

rpm -e application_name_here

Install some base requirements to compile and install the software.

yum -y install gcc gcc-c++ ncurses-devel libxml2-devel libpng-devel

Download the appropriate sources for Apache, PHP, and MySQL and decompress it.

cd /usr/src
wget http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.2.11.tar.gz/from/us.php.net/mirror
wget http://apache.inetbridge.net/httpd/httpd-2.2.14.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.mysql.com/archives/mysql-5.0/mysql-5.0.87.tar.gz
wget ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/freetds/stable/freetds-stable.tgz
tar xzf php-5.2.11.tar.gz
tar xzf httpd-2.2.14.tar.gz
tar xzf mysql-5.0.87.tar.gz
tar xzf freetds-stable.tgz

Build and Install MySQL.

Add the MySQL User and Group

groupadd mysql
useradd -g mysql -c "MySQL Server" mysql

Install MySQL.

cd mysql*
chown -R root.root *
make clean
./configure \
--prefix=/usr/local/mysql \
--localstatedir=/usr/local/mysql/data \
--disable-maintainer-mode \
--with-mysqld-user=mysql \
--with-unix-socket-path=/tmp/mysql.sock \
--without-comment \
--without-debug \
--without-bench
make && make install

Configure MySQL.

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_install_db
chown -R root:mysql /usr/local/mysql
chown -R mysql:mysql /usr/local/mysql/data
cp support-files/my-medium.cnf /etc/my.cnf
chown root:sys /etc/my.cnf
chmod 644 /etc/my.cnf

Set MySQL to start on boot

echo "/usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql" >> /etc/ld.so.conf
ldconfig
cp ./support-files/mysql.server /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysql
chmod +x /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysql
/sbin/chkconfig --level 3 mysql on
service mysql start

This sets up symlinks for all MySQL binaries so that they can be run from anywhere.

cd /usr/local/mysql/bin
for file in *; do ln -s /usr/local/mysql/bin/$file /usr/bin/$file; done

Set a MySQL Root Password for security (obviously use something other than “new-password-here”.

mysqladmin -u root password new-password-here

Test the Password:

mysql -u root -p

While logged into MySQL delete the test database.

drop database test;
use mysql;
delete from db;
delete from user where not (host="localhost" and user="root");
flush privileges;

Building Apache

cd /usr/src/httpd*
make clean
./configure \
--prefix=/usr/local/apache \
--enable-shared=max \
--enable-module=rewrite \
--enable-module=so
make && make install

Build and Install FreeTDS for MSSQL Extension Support.

cd /usr/src/freetds*
./configure
make && make install

Build and Install PHP

cd /usr/src/php*
./configure \
--with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs \
--disable-debug \
--enable-ftp \
--enable-inline-optimization \
--enable-magic-quotes \
--enable-mbstring \
--enable-mm=shared \
--enable-safe-mode \
--enable-track-vars \
--enable-trans-sid \
--enable-wddx=shared \
--enable-xml \
--with-dom \
--with-gd \
--with-gettext \
--with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
--with-regex=system \
--with-xml \
--with-zlib-dir=/usr/lib \
--with-mssql=/usr/local/
make && make install
cp php.ini-dist /usr/local/lib/php.ini

I prefer to symlink configuration files to /etc so that they are easy to find and edit.

ln -s /usr/local/lib/php.ini /etc/php.ini
ln -s /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf /etc/httpd.conf

Edit the Apache Configuration File – I prefer nano.

nano /etc/httpd.conf

Uncomment the following lines or add them (uncommented) if they do not exist after “AddType application/x-tar .tgz”

#AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
#AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Find the DirectoryIndex (CTRL+W in Nano) and add index.php to the beginning.

DirectoryIndex

Set Apache to start on boot and start it for the first time.

ln -s /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl /etc/rc.d/init.d/apache
ln -s /etc/rc.d/init.d/apache /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/S90apache
/etc/rc.d/init.d/apache start

Then, you must configure FreeTDS to point to your MSSQL DB server. To do so, edit (or create) the /usr/local/etc/freetds.conf file and put in there exclusively these lines:

[global]
host = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (ip of the MSSQL server)
port = 1433
client charset = UTF-8
tds version = 7.0 (or 8.0 if using FreeTDS 0.82 or later)
text size = 20971520

I was doing the math on the licensing structure (we’ll go with the 1-CPU Enterprise license as this example).

I will start by saying that I realize it is in LiteSpeed Technologies’ best interests for you to lease your license from them as this gives them the most profit/income etc… where as an Owned license is generally seen as a larger up-front investment to reduce long-term costs.

I am also aware that I am comparing monthly lease to a yearly ownership as I am wanting to compare the extremes (smallest up-front investment vs the largest).

Owned licenses are an investment into LiteSpeed Web Server/Technologies and I always look at investments based upon how well they will return and how long until they return. A 39 month wait until the investment begins to return is a tad too long in my opinion and as you read on you will see the details of my analysis of their licensing program.

The primary problem that I see is that the Owned licensing doesn’t really reduce long-term costs fast enough – the argument could be seen either way that either the leasing prices need increased (sorry, have to share both view points) or that the owned licensing needs to be reduced either the initial purchase or the support renewal costs.

The price of a 1-CPU Enterprise Leased license is $32/month or $384 paid monthly for a year.

The price of a 1-CPU Enterprise Owned license is $41.58/month or $499 paid yearly.

At these prices you could have a Leased license for 15.6 Months for the price of an Owned license for one year – which makes sense if you think about it.  At the end of the first year if you want to continue support and upgrades for your owned license you then have to pay $99 for a support renewal.  You do not have to pay any such renewal fee for Leased license.

The price of a 1-CPU Enterprise Owned license for two years is $598 which would get you 18.69 months of Leased licensing – so after you have your owned license for over 18 and a half months you’ve broken even on your investment of an owned license.  While a year and a half is not a tremendous amount of time – it is asking for a huge investment of your money up front.  To make the Owned license an option you have to be willing to invest over a year and a half into LiteSpeed before you even break even.

After 18.69 months of being on an Owned license and having paid the $99 support fee after a year you will be at approximately $8.25/month for each owned license which isn’t terribly bad (a savings over leased of $23.75/month), but keep in mind it took over a year and a half to get to this point which leads me to my next concern.

The next major concern in my eyes with the current structure is that for the Owned license to “pay for itself” (to return on my original investment) which is one of the primary reasons I look at owned licenses over leased – it will take an additional  21 months for a total of 39 months before going Owned has “paid for itself” and returns on your initial owned licensing investment will be realized if you don’t include the support Renewals. The first and second renewal for a total addition of $198 because by this point you’re already at 39 months before going Owned has paid for itself.

Is it really intentional on the part of LiteSpeedTech to make an Owned license holder have to wait 39 months before they can start to see a return on their investment of going Owned?

What are your thoughts? Post comments!