'I'd kill them, if only to steal money off their dead, twitching bodies to buy queso.' by Kara
Wednesday, January 31, 2007 at 7:04 AM

We're back, and all in one piece. Please click back one or two to see Monday's (and Friday's, if you missed it). Yup, updates kept going. Better believe it.

So what happened? Oh, I'll tell you what happened. (WARNING: Looooong!!!)

You may remember that the site went ker-crash back in November, just before Anime USA. And I was a panicky wreck. I do know that, after a set period of time, yer average webcomic reader is gonna give up on a site that simply doesn't work. Fortunately, through sheer stubbornness, I managed to get tech support for FuitadNET to restore my site. They claimed Turkish hackers (which annoys the hell out of me ... I mean, they already stole my great-great-grandfather's camel caravan, what more do they want from us???). There had been a few other mini-outages over time, and the Co-Writer with the Bluest Liver was begging me to switch. Like an idiot, I kept going neh, it'll be fine now, they said they're putting up a new firewall, and up 'til about a year ago they'd been fine.

I used to wonder what a 'Fuitad' was. I now know that it's an acronym for the main service the company offers, which is Fscking Users in the Arse Daily.* Because when the site went down Friday, I started trying to contact them. Sachin, one of their online tech support monkeys, told me in Live Support Chat that 'We are migrating the servers, please be patient. We have many sites to moves, and this takes time.'

This is the exact same thing they said back in November. I should probably note at this point that Fuitad tech support only know how to say this, or 'We are working on it and will tell you if we hear anything.' The only time I've ever had one say something different is when Sachin, a couple weeks ago in response to another outage, said to me, 'Oh GOD, what is your PROBLEM???? Your site works for ME!!!!'

This should have been a clue that it was time to m. onto g. p.'s. But as friends, publishers, and family know, I'm rubbish at catching clues and generally have to have a nice strong whack upside the head. That whack was this weekend when the site went down at approximately 3 PM on Friday. I hopped into Live Support and got Sharon (who, I found out not long after, is the president of Fuitad -- I also think Sharon is a guy). Sharon explained to me that, once again, the Turks had h4x3d us, and that it was starting to seem like a vendetta. I'm pretty sure, in retrospect, that whoever did this must be a former Fuitad customer.

So ... Sharon told me ... give it three hours (oh, and they always say three hours) while they migrate the servers, and thanks for my patience. Around midnight, I gave up and poked into their IRC. I was not the only irate customer. Although I was super-irate, since I couldn't upload the newest Kalibourne. So I took my laptop into my room, stuck it next to my bed, and woke myself up for periodic checks. (Co-Writers, don't fuss at me. I know it's stupid. But you've gotta admit it's very me.)

Nothing, nothing, nothing. In the morning, the Co-Writer with the Bluest Liver once again tells me to get space somewhere else. I do. And I also find my site backup. In the time between waking up and hearing something from Kunal (who was monitoring the IRC room), I'd set up the site, uploaded the backup minus some Sticky Wicket archives I need to attend to, troubleshot all four auto-archiving codes for the comics, and been sent my new DNS numbers. So when I poked in, I was being reassured once again that their servers would be up soon. Intercourse the server, I said. My site was already up and working somewhere else. For the last 12 hours. Update my DNS numbers, please.

Allow me to explain. For those who don't know, 'DNS' stands for 'Domain Name System.' It refers to URLs and numbers that dictate where a domain leads. Basically, if you buy a domain name, the seller controls where tat domain name leads until you transfer it to someone else. However, if you switch, the new company can't just take the DNS info. They have to be given it. And the DNS info was still with ... you guessed it ... Fuitad.

So Fuitad had me by the short rabbits. There was literally nothing I could do but yell and scream at them. Which I did. And the CW with the BL even asked me to teach her to use IRC just so she could come in and give them extra hell. (Amusing aside: when one of the techies asked me for my domain name for about the twenty-billionth time so that they could do absolutely nothing with it, one person in the chat went, 'Omigod, my sister reads your stuff!!!! That's where the site went!!!' Truly, adversity brings us together.) I kept asking them why they couldn't go into their server, erase one set of numbers, and put in new ones. Our IT guy at work had just done it the other day. Guess what they told me??? 'We're migrating the servers.' Well, quite. That has bugger-all to do with fsck, but what was I expecting?

It's Monday night. I've been posting updates on the community, OnlineComics.net, and the Jefferson Institute ComicSpace ... this is why I told you guys to bookmark 'em!). I've officially gone through four of the five stages of mourning and was on to 4.5: freaking out and stamping my feet in front of my g'mother while she was eating a sandwich. I'm now into calling the techies nasty names in IRC to get their attention while re-enacting with the Co-Writer with the Longest Hair what it would be like if Fuitad ran 911. ('Have a nice day??? But ... I'm DYING!!!' 'We are currently moving all our hospital beds one town over. You understand that this takes a lot of time.' 'I'm BLEEDING!!!')

Finally, after repeating my DNS request so many times that I've macroed it to 5 on my number pad, I'm asked for the numbers again. Five seconds later. Ping. Why ... did they not ... do this ... before.

After a bit of a rough start, the site came back. I nearly start weeping. Well, no, I do start weeping.

Oh, did I mention I reported them to the BBB?

I won't make this rant any longer, to spare you all. If you have been, what a relief.

* This is probably not true, but I came up with it Saturday night and I thought it was awesome.