Rant..... come and have one.

[Haze]

Just had a call from one saying he can't access emails, or see his site, or my site.... but I can access all the sites, although not accessed his emails of course.... he doesn't believe it is his ISP (bt).... oh, and it's nearly the weekend..... then I gave him mail2web.com, and now he can access the emails... so it isn't the fn hosting service provider, but how do you say that nicely.....? Answer is, you can't.....

Guess we should have a rant forum....

[net-curtains]

I have a standard email reply ready telling clients to reboot their PC/clear browser cache/reboot router/check with ISP etc. I sent one yesterday funnily enough. It's always amazing how clients automatically assume that there's a 'problem' or the website is 'broken', even, as was the case yesterday, when I've been through all this with them before. 'Oh yes' they say 'I remember now'.

Part of the job unfortunately.

[Haze]

BT issue I am told. And I believe it too. Good old BT.

[robwhizz]

We are with BT here at work, and their DNS is useless. Had problems every other day accessing sites. Once I changed the DNS servers never had another problem.


My rant is that no matter how many times I tell people that failing to connect/find an address does not mean there is a problem with the server, I get no end of "Rob, can't get mail, the server is down", or "Can't see this site, the server is down."
Arghhhhhhh. No. Please remove the word 'server' from your vocabulary - you have no idea what you are talking about regardless of how many times I explain it to you. The server is most likely not down. What is down is our crappy BT internet, or you've turned off your wireless, or the router has crashed, or the firewall has picked up an browser update and is waiting for me to authorise it, or you have sent a link to a file directly from the harddisk or ... Basically 1001 things that have nothing to do with any servers being 'down'.

/carry on

[Haze]

All sounds so familiar... this guys was impossible to convince this afternoon. He refused to believe that there was anything at issue with BT.... my GOD!

[Charisma Bypass]

Guess we should have a rant forum....

I'm told there is a Nasty Gaff that is just right for a rant now and then.

[Haze]

Oh well, I'm too innocent to wander in there..... You never know what you'll read.... 

[sarahA]

Virgin and BT both had DNS issues recently, same with Sky. I suddenly couldn't access a couple of sites on our own server but tried via a VPN connection and they worked fine.

Unfortunately if you call your ISP and ask/tell them there's a problem they'll first blame the host. Even if you tell them that you know the site is working they'll still blame the host and say to get them to reboot the server.

There are a couple of forum posts about this on the respective support forums which may aid in proving that it's an ISP issue, however you just need to spell it out to them (professionally, politely etc), if they can access their email or access their website on their mobile phone, then the server is online and it's their home/work connection which is out of your control. If they still moan then ignore them and leave them to go elsewhere. They'll suffer the same at some point I'm sure.

[Haze]

I was sent this link, and thought it may be of interest to those who have bt customers.... I kow mine NEVER checks BT forums.

http://community.bt.com/t5/Broadband-in-the-home/BT-DNS-problems-on-co-uk-domains/m-p/7653

[net-curtains]

Just started my third working weekend in a row with a delightful email from a current client. Nothing to do with BT, but they're complaining about the content for a particular page, which they provided. The long and winding 5 sheets of A4 length text is the content for three different pages, but all mixed together. The client knows that they're supposed to supply the content, but in this instance seems to have assumed I would do 'something clever' with it. Basically they expected me to wade through and re-write the whole thing, and split it into three different pages.

Of course this email was peppered with words such as 'PROBLEM', 'WRONG', 'MISTAKE', and 'HATE'. All of which, as well as being negative and hardly conducive to a professional working relationship shouldn't have been included. There isn't a 'problem', nothing is 'wrong', there are no 'mistakes', the content was added as supplied. And if you 'hate' the result then provide something that makes sense.

I did an ecom site recently, for a nice lady, but dreaded getting emails from her. She would use the word 'problem' in the title, and about three times in the content, usually along with 'broken', 'error', and 'server'. I'd get three or four emails a day when we were building the site, and you would think the world was ending the amount of 'problems' that were occurring. Of course they were nothing of the sort, usually the 'problem' was that the missing text was something they hadn't supplied, or the 'problem with the text' was their typo. For several months I had almost daily emails about 'problems with the server', and every time it was a BT/browser issue.

Anyway, so much for my Saturday morning, I didn't expect problems first thing.

[ih8mondays]

Virgin and BT both had DNS issues recently, same with Sky. I suddenly couldn't access a couple of sites on our own server but tried via a VPN connection and they worked fine.

Yeah, it's affecting me on 3 mobile too.

I'd phone them, but I know they wouldn't understand or would make up some bullshit. 

After all, when there was transmitter problems in the area the other week affecting both my mobile phone's internet and also my laptop and mobile broadband dongle, their advice was to remove vista service pack 2 from the laptop and factory reset my phone...