Our ISP, and especially this blog, is under some sort of comment spam attack, substantial enough to hamper system performance and making this site and others at the same host difficult to reach and use.

The ISP has forcibly shut down comments to this blog. I will expect this to be a very short-term measure, otherwise I’ll have to look for other hosting.

Update: despite being told they had done this, they now say they have not done this but will temporarily do so during attacks. So confusing! At least if you see things behaving weirdly here you’ll have some idea why…

Appallingly, the ISP that hosts portigal.com pulled our plug around midnight last night when we exceeded our monthly bandwidth. I am spluttering with rage (really; I am wiping down the screen as I type) and frustration. There was no warning. Indeed, when I got a cryptic automatic warning a month ago and inquired about it, there was no help. I guess blog traffic is pushing me over the edge on bandwidth. That means some form of success, and paying the price for it.

I was able to pay more money and get back into my email, blog, website, etc. And now I’m having Stockholm syndrome. Well, no, but the incredible hassle of moving seems beyond my emotional and technological fortitude at this point – now that this is run with WordPress, I suspect that moving is even hairier than before.

Anyway, very little emailed appeared after this 11 hour absence, and at least one person is reporting a bounceback (that’s not what is supposed to happen, of course). Email is back, so if you sent something and it bounced, please resend.

Classy all the way here. Sheesh. Sorry for any inconvenience.

The new blog is here!

Not only a new blog, but now the entire site is in WordPress – this makes for some interesting things (like trying to have separate feeds for FreshMeat and this blog; or titling this page “All This ChittahChattah” while titling the rest of the site “Portigal Consulting”).

FreshMeat is definitely not working right now, but maybe within 24 hours we’ll have them all back up and sorted out (they are still up, under the old URLs, but whatever)

If you see other weirdness with the site, let me know

CoVisp‘s About Us page offers a (now offline) link to their Business Code of Ethics but the entire page is obviously copied-and-pasted from corporate text at XO.COM.

Welcome

While other companies are talking about making telecommunications simple, XO actually delivers simplicity without compromising the level of service that business customers expect. XO is able to cut through the clutter in the telecom space and offer businesses what they need: a reliable, end-to-end source for telecom services with a broad product suite backed by trustworthy, dependable customer service. XO offers new customers a no-risk satisfaction guarantee on standard products and services for the first three months after installation.

Everything You Want. Exactly What You Need.

Company Information
See why businesses just like yours have found a happy ending with the XO story.
* Proven Leadership and Innovation
* Network AssetsCustomer Centric
* Extensive Product Portfolio

Investors Center
View the latest financial information through a comprehensive listing of all XOÔø? Annual Reports, Quarterly Earnings Statements, and other pertinent financial news.

Business Code of Ethics
This document contains the XO Policy and Ethics for all XO employees, as required for posting by the SEC.

Careers
Interested in a career with a truly unique telecommunications company? Explore our career center for the latest job postings and company information. If you find the perfect listing, submit your resume online.

The COVISP Network
XO has a unique ability to serve customers from premise-to-premise over XO facilities, ultimately ensuring the highest levels of performance and reliability. See what makes our network unique.

Today I received this email

To: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
From: steve_portigal@sbcglobal.net
Subject: Disk Usage Warning (critical)
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 05:51:58 -0800

The account with the username ‘stevep’, is running out of disk space.
Please remove some files from this account, or ask the administrator to increase your disk quota.
You have currently used 90.85% of your disk space.

Talk about useless! It’s autogenerated from myself, to myself. It doesn’t make any reference to what organization, site, company, or anything, except for stevep – you can imagine that I’ve got many accounts using the name stevep. I eventually ran an nslookup on the IP address in the header (yeah, that’s what I did and for most people what I just wrote is complete nonsense) to see that it came from my ISP. But I have two domains registered with that ISP! They don’t tell me which one, they expect me to map the login to the domain? Even their support person couldn’t tell me what domain this account name referred to; he suggested I tell him all my domains and then he could tell me which one this was? I happen only to have two, but what if I had 30? Or 300? I’m sure that’s not unusual.

Very very crappy error messages, and of course, the usual technical-oriented support that doesn’t feel this is really a problem they need to address.