[Thing.net-support] turbulences

[w]

dear thing.net user, friend or customer:

unfortunately we experienced some heavy turbulences this week.  this was
due to a freak accident that theoretically should not happen or maybe
once in a thousand years.  it's not that our system doesn't have the
necessary redundancy.  we have a raid mirror, which means when a hard
drive fails there is a back-up copy.  now we had a situation where both
drives (!) showed defects at the same time and consequently the
mirroring system failed.  the system crashed completely on monday around
14 hours est.  

recovery took so long because the copying of the files from the sick
drive partitions is a painfully slow process.  also, some users' mail
folders had become somewhat obese with tons of undeleted spam and junk
mail which further slowed down the transfer.  

i want to ask you on this occasion to please be more frugal and, if you
are using the IMAP protocol, delete unnecessary emails and empty
your trash can regularly.  this might sound a bit old fashioned in times
of 10 gigabyte google email accounts, but we really would rather not
follow down that path.  it's a waste of resources and we'd rather run a
"green" server.  

at this time all email is working again, but we are still copying web
domains.  after all copying is done, the fried drives will be replaced
with new ones.  you can get status updates at http://isp.thing.net and
http://post.thing.net.

it's been a couple of rough weeks here.  first hurricane sandy and five
days of no electricity in lower manhattan.  then, two weeks ago many
thing.net users received a phishing scam email pretending to
be from a certain "Thing.net  Admin Technical Team" asking in slightly
russian inflected english for account passwords.  unfortunately some
users fell for the trick and the "pharmacy" spammers used our server to
send millions of spam mails.  as a result our server was blacklisted as
a spam machine and i still have to send out reports to our data center
and the spam cops to clear our name.   and now, to top it off, this
freakish hardware failure happens.   

i'm really sorry for the inconvenience, email is indispensable
for most of us.  we really tried to fix everything as fast as humanly
possible.

happy post turkey day,

wolfgang