Some days, everything works, right off the bat. You wake up, roll out of bed to your desk, fire up an SSH session, and you’re at work in a matter of seconds. Except today. Today, SSH didn’t work. “Remote host not found.” Odd. Restart the cable modem, try again. “Remote host not found.”

OK, new method. Fire up the cell phone. Connect via GPRS. SSH in, ‚”Remote host not found.”

Today is not going to go well. The sky is dark, and there’s ice on the roads. My toast got burnt, and I couldn’t find my fucking glasses. But this was just the start. Yesterday, around 9.30 am, Eclipse UK, a major UK ADSL provider, started to experience glitches. Disconnects, the odd DNS glitch. They spent the day up and down. The odd irate call from clients, but nothing a power cycle on the router didn’t fix. As such, I went to bed not worried about it.

And this morning, it’s all gone to shit. Eclipse put the problem as a “platform failure‚” and say that the issue is fixable with just a router restart. But it’s not true. Four times, Eclipse have issued press releases saying the issue was under control. It’s not. All restarting the router achieves is pushes any one connection to a different part of Cloud and Colossus - if you’re lucky, you’ll get a slot, connect, and then all you’ve got to worry about is fucked DNS. Because don’t forget, the DNS shat itself, too. Joy of joys.

It’s now been almost 36 hours since the fucking platform went down. You’d expect that in a few hours, you could rollback software changed. You can rebuild configurations. You’d have redundant hardware. Hell, you could replace most of the racks in that time. But no. No one has a fucking clue there. The support number is just on voicemail. My direct dial numbers are answering to total utter silence. Wait a minute on the line, it hangs up. Faxes go un-answered. It’s not a power issue, either. They’ve got diesel backup. The offices haven’t burned down. The staff are there, they’ve been seen in and out of the building. The dial-up accounts still work. But ADSL is dead. DNS works for dial-up but not on anything else.

In the time wasted on this fucking adventure, I could have re-written the DNS and MX settings for my clients, have them propagate, and sent them elsewhere for at least things like email. Did I mention the spam? Thousands of mis-delivered messages. One site gets on average, a hundred a day. Right now, it’s getting 2,400 mis-delivered messages each minute. We’ve left it running, and we’re taking bets on what happens first; the 120Gb HD filling up, or Outlook shitting itself.

So much time wasted. So much stress, so much anger. It’s fucking plain that no one there has any fucking clue what the fuck is going on. They have no idea how to fix whatever the issue is. They may as well just rip the ATM core to fucking pieces, piss on it, and build a new one. There is nothing left to do. Right now, I’m still getting irate calls from people bitching about lack of email. I’m just going to turn my phone off and forward everything to Eclipse’ support number. I’m that fucked off.

And wait, there’s more! At home there is no ADSL, it’s a cable connection. This morning, it went down for about 20 minutes for a service upgrade. It came back, twice as fast. I go out, deal with fucking morons and then come back to the receive and status lights on the modem blinking at me. A phone call later, and Telewest kindly inform me that the upgrade to the network has gone tits up. The connectivity in the area is screwed for an undetermined length of time. Great. No ADSL. No cable. I need to send a fucking email. Connect via GPRS. The phone won’t keep a connection for more than 30 seconds.

I’ve fucking had it. Lord only knows when this gets posted. Right now, I don’t even fucking care anymore. Fuck this shit. I’m leaving