Often times I use this blog as a bully pulpit of sorts when companies act in a negative way.   The thought is two fold that it helps to vent a bit and it also helps everyone when the public holds companies accountable.   The first step in that is for people to share their experiences.  It goes without saying that anything I write here is just my experience and others may have had completely different experiences.

That said, it is much easier to write a blog post when something negative has happened and much more difficult to remember and write about all the positive things that happen numerous time each day.  This week I had one incident that clearly stood out and made me pause to say – now that is how customer service is done!   That company, Room and Board, is somewhat known for their good customer service.  We’ve been to their store in SoHo numerous times and have many pieces of their furniture in our apartment.  Since moving back to Austin, there is no store so we rely on their website.  Recently, we were buying some chairs for our office.  These chairs happened to be on special 15% off when we ordered them.

Unfortunately, when they arrived we had ordered slightly the wrong ones.  They did not have adjustable arms – something which makes a huge difference in comfort, in my opinion.  The ones w/ adjustable arms were not much more and it was a simple oversight when we clicked order.  And, in my mind, one of the downfalls of web shopping – had we been present we surely would have sat in, tried out and picked out the right chairs.

I called into customer service to arrange a return and hopefully to get the correct chairs sent out.  When I talked to the CSR she informed me that while she’d be happy to place the order for the new chairs, she would not be able to honor he sale price as the sale had ended the day before.  I understood why she couldn’t do it, but some how it just felt wrong.  After some discussion, I told her to just go ahead and process the return and that we’d get the chair someplace else or another time.

After I hung up the phone I was sitting there feeling bad about the entire thing.  If I had just paid more attention we would have gotten the right chairs.  If Room and Board wasn’t so inflexible.  etc, etc.  Just then my cell phone rang.  It was the Room & Board customer service rep.  She explained that she had just not felt right about not being able to give us the sale price and that she’d gone and presented our case to her manager.  They’d agreed that despite the policy, in this instant, it made since to go ahead and extend the sale price for the replacement chair, if I’d like to order it.  Absolutely, I said…. and the rest is history.

There are a few things about this that make this customer service done right.  The foremost is that a customer service rep actually looked at the situation as the unique set of events that it was and was able to step outside of the rules to make an exception.  The second was that she actually used her head to make this decision instead of just blindly following the computer screen.  And finally, that she actually cared enough to take the time to see if she could make things better.

It was a small effort, but it went a long way and in my mind they’ve earned serious points and they’ve earned a customer for life.  Anyone looking for quality home or office furnishings should seriously check them out.  Online at http://www.roomandboard.com

This is the second part to my previous post “Migrating Zimbra to Rackspace Cloud from Dedicated Rackspace Server” – I decided to put up separate posts as the first one was already pretty long.  After receiving the updated instructions I uninstalled the existing installation and set out to start over.    One cool thing about the cloud is when I decided to start fresh, through my control panel, I can just rebuild the machine to the fresh install.  I did this and set out to migrate again.  I ran into several problems along the way, but they were mostly just random things – some having to do w/ migration and some just with installing on Ubuntu.  In case anyone else runs into them I’ll outline the issues and the solution:

• LDAP time out errors
  Since I was migrating from one server to another, I wanted to get the second server setup before taking the other completely offline.  This meant that the DNS for the hostname was still technically pointed to the old server.  Once I manually put in an entry in the hosts file pointing the mail server domain name to the local public IP address, the timeouts went away and the install completed normally.
• libpcre3 missing
  During the install process it complained, though it did not error out, about this missing library.  Simply doing an apt-get to install it fixed this error.
• Helpful Hint – Logins / Password from the old server
  One thing in the instructions provided that you need to do is get your LDAP / MySQL passwords and your accounts used for spam / not spam.  To do this, on the old server:

  zmprov gacf | grep -i account

  And to get the ldap passwords:

  zmlocalconfig -s | grep -i password

  Much thanks to ZImbra support for that tip!  Made things much easier.

• SMTP Freezes after MAIL FROM
  The install and migration of the files went relatively smoothly.  When I fired things backup I did a manual telnet to port 25 to check that it was receiving mail.  The SMTP server would just freeze after I issued the MAIL FROM.  I decided to take a page from the other migration guide that said after you had finished migration to re-run the installation script.  After doing so this problem cleared.
• parts_decode_ext FAILED: Unix utility file
  Finally mail was being accepted, but I noticed it was all getting deferred.  After looking at the error message, “zimbra parts_decode_ext fail,” and doing a search – it turns out it was missing “file” a command line tool.  Again using apt-get to install file cleared this up.
• Cleaning up
  I then had to do some random clean up stuff, like adjusting the IPs that were allowed to relay to include the IP of the mail server.  Finally, some mail was getting deferred because it was trying to deliver it to the old mail server.  Once I finally switched the DNS (I had put the TTL down to 5 min) this cleared up.

So, I now have a successfully running mail server on the Rackspace Cloud.    It will be interesting to see how this performs vs. our dedicated server.  It feels much speedier already, but we’ll see how that goes as time passes.  Stay tuned.

P.S. Much thanks to Santosh Rao w/ Zimbra Support for his help during this process.

Update: Whoops!  One snag.  Road Runner is blocking the IP address of this new server – so we can’t get e-mail to road runner accounts!  http://security.rr.com/cgi-bin/block-lookup?67.23.29.240 Working w/ RackSpace to resolve this, though it is cumbersome via a chat-only support system.  Wish it had a “ticket” system like classic Rackspace.

Today I began migrating our Zimbra mail server from our Rackspace dedicated server to the Rackspace cloud.  This is going to be an ongoing post that I intend to update throughout the process.

Migrating from: RedHat EL 5 32 bit

To: Rackspace Cloud Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 64bit

This mail server only has about a dozen users.  Still, I’m going for the 2gb cloud option as I want nice performance.  We rely on e-mail more than any other form of communication at Tipit.  I am following the instructions here:

http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2007/10/moving-zcs-to-another-server.html

The first ting that concerns me is going from 250gb to 80gb.  Sure enough after moving everything over, the drive is at 60% capacity.  May need to look at bumping up the storage / increasing the server size since Rackspace cloud doesn’t let you add more than the allotted storage to the various instances.

Everything went very smoothly and being in the same data center the file move was extremely fast.  The final step:

As Root: rerun the installer without the -s option

just blew up on me.

The system will be modified.  Continue? [N] Y

Shutting down zimbra mail

Backing up the ldap database…failed.

./util/utilfunc.sh: line 1221: /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat: No such file or directory

After some further testing, this file does appear to be there, though it’s a symbolic link:

ls -la /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 May  3 22:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 May  3 22:30 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapacl -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapadd -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapauth -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapcat -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapdn -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slapindex -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slappasswd -> ../libexec/slapd
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 May  3 22:30 slaptest -> ../libexec/slapd

I checked out the utilfunc.sh script and tried to run it by hand:

/opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat -f /opt/zimbra/conf/slapd.conf -b ” -l /opt/zimbra/openldap-data/ldap.bak
-su: /opt/zimbra/openldap/sbin/slapcat: No such file or directory

Same result.   Checking the dedicated RedHat original server, the structure looks identical.  Permissions look identical.  Symbolic link looks identical.  There, taking a backup of LDAP using the same command works fine.

Alse tried:

/opt/zimbra/openldap/libexec/slapd -f /opt/zimbra/conf/slapd.conf -b ” -l /opt/zimbra/openldap-data/ldap.bak
-su: /opt/zimbra/openldap/libexec/slapd: No such file or directory

Same result

Opened a support ticket with Zimbra.  Rolled back and put original zimbra mail server back online.

Just received a very speedy response from Zimbra support:

Ideally you should have followed : http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Network_Edition:_Moving_from_32-bit_to_64-bit_Server

I am not sure if what your are following is a very good idea if migrating between architectures. Things are bound to fail because the underlying binaries are pre compiled 32 bit binaries. It would be best if you remove the current install and do a clean install of the same version as of the old server and copy over the store,index,ldap and mysql data manually. The steps are outlined in the above wiki.

Do let me know if you run into issues.

Regards,

Santosh Rao
Zimbra Network Support

Ok, fair enough, though the symptoms of the symbolic links not working in Ubuntu don’t seem to be a 32 bit vs 64 bit binary issue.  But, sure, let’s follow the other method and see what happens.

Random thoughts on a Saturday morning.  This has probably been done and it sounds like it could be a horrible emo flick.  But, I was thinking it’d be fun to do an entire movie based on the stains / scratches / minor damage to an apartment / house.  Maybe the setting is a random family moving out of a house that they’ve lived in for a long time.  Each stain causes a flash back to some event: a party, a dinner, a fight, a visitor.  Through the flash backs, by the end of the movie, a complete story unfolds.

Ok there’s the concept – now just hire the writers to do the hard work and make it an interesting story!

A couple of months ago I began evaluating web meeting services.  I had used one before, I can’t remember which one it was, but it worked well. The only issue was you couldn’t host  meetings on a Mac.  A few of the competing services allowed you to do this so I set out to find one.  I signed up for some trials and they all seemed to work ok.  It kind of came down to Citrix GoToMeeting and the WebEx meeting center.  They both seemed to do what I needed.  Low and behold I receive this e-mail from Jeffrey Mulholland:

Tomorrow is the quarter end for WebEx. If you are interested in our core service of Meeting Center, I can offer you your first month of service for free if you sign up by tomorrow.

Great!  They’re being pro-active, they want my business both good signs for a ongoing service relationship.  I had him sign me up.  During that first month I was in the process of moving and didn’t get chance to use it too much.  During the second month I setup a handful of webex conferences.  Each time, something else went wrong.

Bad Service

One time, my screen wouldn’t refresh for anyone viewing it unless I accessed a drop down menu.  So every time I navigated to a new page I had to go up to the drop down and ask everyone on the call if they could now see the updated screen.  Made for a very painful demo.

The next time the teleconferencing was horrible.  There were massive delays, one person would finish and different people would hear that person at different times.  Everybody was unsure of when to speak and people kept getting cut off.

Variations of these problems continued.  Ok, not so great a service.  It’s not good, but not the end of the world.  I’ll keep using it as I shop around for an alternative.

Bad Usability

Throughout the service it had been difficult to navigate.  The meeting organization system seemed very clunky.  When the usability (or lack there of) really shined though was when we got a paper invoice.  That’s right, for a web service that we signed up for online they sent us a paper invoice.  How annoying.  And for $69.  Ok, let’s go setup paperless billing and pay this w/ a credit card.   After what can only be described as a process I get to the point where you have to register to be able to see / pay your invoice online.  Yes, that’s right, I already have a login, am the only user aka the admin and have a complete control panel (confusing as it may be), but now I have to register.  Ok, fine.

Yup.  The error message says it all.  After going through several web interfaces to try to get to support, I finally dig up a sign up e-mail giving me my user name that has a direct support e-mail address in it and send them an e-mail letting them know of my problem.   As of starting this post, I had received no response.  In the middle of writing it I got a response telling me that they had now associated my e-mail address w/ their billing system.  This was 5 days later.

Bad Support

In the mean time, given the bad service and terrible usability of the service, I decided it was best if I just flat out cancel it.  Well, this is when I really got irritated.  One of the worst things a web service can do, in my opinion, is make it difficult or impossible to cancel.  There is no information online that I could find on how to go about this.  There was a lot that talked about MeetMeNow (their other product), but nothing for meeting center.  Finally, I decided to just fill out the support form.  In the middle of it, when I selected it was an “emergency,” it popped up w/ a phone number.  I decided to just expedite this process and pick up the phone.

I was directed to a call center in India.  The representative told me I had called support and I needed to talk to another department.  Thankfully he transferred me.  When the other representative was on the phone the accent was so thick I could barely understand what he was saying.   Not that it matters a lot, but in my current mood it really made the process even more unpleasant.

After telling him I wanted to cancel and after being asked telling him all the problems I’ve had with the service, he agreed to go ahead and cancel it.  He then came back and said, ok, you need to give 30 days and then it extends to the end of the next billing cycle, so the soonest I can cancel the service is on July 27.  Are you kidding?  I responded.

No, sadly he was not kidding.  So, they’re milking me for another $140 for a service that never even worked for me in the first place.

I write all this for one simple reason.  If you are weighing your options and considering one of these services, heed my experience and do not use webex meeting center.  I have subsequently had serveral good experiences w/ citrix go to meeting and would recommend them any day over the webex product.

Recently I’ve become more interested in the “Rackspace Cloud” as a viable solution for our clients needs.  Traditionally we have maintained dedicated servers w/ traditional Rackspace and hosted our clients sites / applications on there.   I have had no problems, so I have been hesitant to even take a look at other solutions.  Recently, however, as we’ve begun doing more Django applications in addition to our traditional work load of ASP.NET & PHP sites, I was turned onto Sicehost.  They were a perfect fit.  Then, low and behold, Rackspace bought Slicehost!   This seems to have evolved into what is now the Rackspace cloud.   So, naturally, my curiosity was peaked.  This was further spurred along by a recent friendfeed conversation.

I began to ask myself, could we realistically move away from traditional dedicated servers to virtualized servers and exist entirely in what is known as “the cloud”, while maintaining the same level of dependability that our clients have come to rely upon?  If we could then certainly the sheer scalability potential and flexibility would be worth it.   So, I began to take a closer look.

First, it is helpful to point out the three services that comprise the Rackspace Cloud aka Mosso:

Cloud Servers

This essentially seems to be the Mosso branding of what Slicehost offers.   The main difference being the Mosso service is a more pure pay per use model.  In other words you pay for the instances hourly.  You pay for your bandwidth separately.  Whereas with Slicehost it is a bundled offering w/ monthly charges for the servers and a set bandwidth that comes w/ the monthly fee.  Only Linux flavors offered.

Cloud Sites

This service is sort of like merging a type of traditional hosting company w/ cloud computing.  It promises a hybrid structure being able to deliver ASP.NET side by side w/ PHP (as an example).  Given that the Cloud Servers only offers Linux flavors, this would have to be capable of hosting our ASP.NET sites.

Update: I was recently asked if you could use Cloud Sites with Django.  From what I’ve read, you cannot because you don’t have access to mod_python – the python support is just CGI scripts.  For more information check out this post:

The perl and python support is just generic CGI script support. So there’s no support for mod_python, and therefore you can’t run Django.

Cloud Files

This is essentially the LimeLight CDN offered in an on-demand fashion coupled w/ the Cloud Sites / Servers offering.  In other words, if you have media files that you want to push to edge servers for quicker loading by the end user, this can simply be “enabled” to provide that on a simple per-use charge.

So, given the above services, several questions popped up.  Today I was able to chat w/ one of the support representatives and here are the answers:

Is there external access directly to the SQL Server 2008 database?

Yes.  Given the IP address of the SQL server you can access the database directly via SQL Management Studio.  Or, in our case, we have a scheduled process that runs against a SQL Server database.  This could run on a dedicated server still and use the SQL Server 2008 instance while the web app runs on the Cloud Sites.

What type, if any, firewall is available ?

With Cloud Sites access is limited to HTTP and FTP(S).  With the Cloud Servers only software firewalls (IPCHAINS).  No hardware firewalls are offered.

When signing up for the backup service, is the database also backed up?

I forgot to ask how this is handled w/ the SQL Server 2008 – I’m sure there are backups, but can a single DB be restored if say there is data corruption for some reason?  Unsure, I will ask and update this post.

With MySQL on the Cloud Servers, only file system backups take place.  So, if you want to backup MYSQL in any other way that simply having the DB files backed up you’d have to put in a cron job to do MYSQL dumps so those individual DB files could be backed up from the file system. With Rackspace traditional dedicated servers there is a MySQL agent that essentially does this for you.

With the “hybrid” system can I use a .htaccess w/ mod_rewrite commands w/ an ASP.NET web app?

Here I didn’t quite understand how this “hybrid” system worked.  After discussing w/ the support representative what happens is you still chose either Linux / Apache or Windows / IIS to host your web files.  The difference is that Windows / IIS also has PHP / Python enabled so you can also use those tools in addition to ASP.NET.  The Linux flavor doesn’t support ASP.NET.  As such if you want to run ASP.NET and PHP side by side, you have to pick the Windows / IIS flavor for that domain and then you can use PHP as well.  But, you wouldn’t have access to .htaccess for things like mod_rewrite which are available in the Linux / Apache world.

This ended up being a deal breaker for me as we use the Helicon Tech ISAPI Rewrite module to give our Windows / IIS based sites mod_rewrite capabilities.  We use this quite extensively and simply must have the ability to put mod_rewrite rules in the .htaccess files for our ASP.NET sites too.  If this was available, I think we could make it work and switch completely to the cloud.  Until it is, we will need to maintain our dedicated server for our ASP.NET sites.

Incidentally, if you are wondering why Amazon EC2 was not mentioned here, it is primarily because the Amazon service is ephermal which means that the instances can pop up and down.  This always seemed to be a challenge when assessing it against our client needs.  There is a good comparison between Amazon EC2 and Mosso Cloud Servers on the Mosso site.

Conclusion, we are going to start using the cloud for our Linux needs, but we will keep w/ dedicated servers for our Windows ASP.NET needs, for now.

My company, tipit, focuses on web production work which means we architect, design and build websites and web applications.  Recently we have had some extremely satisfied clients offering wordpress as a turnkey content management solution.  Recent versions are truly powerful and a few custom plugins can mold it into a system to manage whatever type of content you might need to manage for your website.   In fact, this is a great, great tool for small businesses.

In the coming months, we plan to start offering this as our primary solution to help small businesses utilize the power of the Internet to market their companies.  It’s great because there are already plugins available for a variety of social networking / real-time web systems allowing the business to harness its customers as a community.  Scoble hits on this in a recent post. Most businesses – especially small ones – look like their website was built in the mid 90’s.  It’s time for an update and using open source software like wordpress, especially if you base a design on an available theme, the business can get one powerful website w/ the ability to use a multi-tude of web marketing tools for a very reasonable price.

To further emphasize this, noupe has a post about 25 unique uses of wordpress as a CMS.  The flexibility is astounding.  We look forward to being able to energize main street w/ our efforts!

A good friend of mine, Glynn Owens, passed away several years ago.  Recently, I’ve been working on a project that has made me think of him a bit more than usual.  In particular, I’m reminded of this e-mail that has since become known as “Glynn’s Happy Hour Manifesto.”  I’d like to share that here.

Email sent Friday, January 26, 2001 5:16 PM

Corporate culture sucks.  Here I am at home for over
two hours and you people still have no discernable
intention of consuming frosty malted adult beverages.
Do you see what the damn bottom line does to people.
I think there needs to be some serious changes made in
the way companies treat people.  Its just not right to
still be at work at 5:00 on a Friday.  Friday happy
hour is a basic human right.  I hear it is up for
discussion at the U.N.  Well let me tell you people,
it just isn't going to happen unless you do something
about it.  You think the man is going to just waltz in
an release you from your tired post where you have
been alienated from you labor from the last five days
on end?  No! Not if he thinks he can squeeze another
drop of sweat from your brows.  You people need to
rise up, take what is yours.  "Liberties are not
given; they are taken."  I bet if you were to look
over at the man sitting there you'd see he's done less
today than you have all week.  Don't let yourself get
pushed around.  He needs you more than you need him.
Remember you can fool some people sometime, but you
can't fool all the people all the time.  So see the
light.  Take what has been coming to you all week. 

There oughta be a law.

Oh Austin, please lighten up a bit!  Tonight we strolled down to the second street cinco de mayo festival.  It was a gorgeous evening out and we ducked in for a phenomenal salad at Leaf.  Hoping to join the festivities, have a beer, see some friends and watch a bit of the bands we entered the portion of closed off second street.   It quickly became apparent that in order to get a beer you had to go to the “beer garden” — a fenced off sub-area of the block.  I’ve seen this practice before at places all over the country and it has always seemed a little puritanical and representative of the worst parts of America.  What’s the real harm in serving beer in a closed off street?  The area is already cordoned off, is it really necessary to put a 12 foot tall chain link fence and make the beer drinkers watch the bands from a seeming cage?

Cinco de Mayo Festival Downtown Austin

To my delight, I’ve noticed that many Austin area coffee houses are now using the Pacific Barista Series Soy product.  This is the absolute BEST soy milk for making delicious Lattes & Cappucinos.  Unfortunately, I have been unable to find this for sale at any retail establishment.   I even e-mailed Pacific Foods and got the following response:

From:  Andrea M. Fields
To: JpMaxMan
Date:  Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 3:13 PM
Subject: RE: Pacific Natural Foods Inquiry
Hi Jp,

So glad to hear you had a great experience with our product. Unfortunately, the Barista Series product is a Food Service line that is only offered through distributors and not through retail. You could ask the coffee shop if they would be willing to sell you some of their product.

Good luck!

Andrea

Totally sucks, what about the home baristas who like to make their own delicious coffee drinks.   We are just left out in the cold?  We have to run a commercial shop to get this product?  This must not be right – this is a free market after all.  So, if anyone knows anywhere in the Austin area or over the Internet to order this product (even by the case) let me know!  It seriously makes the BEST coffee drinks!