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NOT HOT! Just FYI: Cyberwings - Received an email from DomainsPricedRight.com

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Brasscat, I have to largely agree with you. Even the chat transcripts are so useful simply because the alternative has been absolutely nothing--like some muddy and thick water in a deep desert.

They SHOULD have a simple FAQ about this--organized, concise, and coherent. Why don't they? No idea, except that perhaps Shawn prefers things to be a one-man show (a mistake, if true), and he's just been too busy to do it himself.

And I think you pointed out the real issue, too: does Shawn White have not merely the chutzpah (that's not in doubt) but the acumen to make this thing succeed? That isn't clear yet. True believers say yes, skeptics say no, cynics say it's all a fraud. The cynics are wrong, IMHO, but the skeptics may be right--or not. Should be a comparatively simple business (at least if one hires good techs, as I think he has; AND runs the numbers thoroughly before taking actions, ...?), but time will tell. His displayed acumen through this time of dramatic upsizing for Cyberwings has not been reassuring (as your and others' comments so painfully confirm); but some people learn best under pressure and on the job.

ONLY time will tell.
 
BTW, Cyberwings does seem to be learning a bit. Their newly revised Cyberwings Status Site has some timely, clear, and straightforwardly honest updates at the top. IF they keep this up--if they have any brains at all, they will--this is a huge improvement in communication.

(Of course, it's also painful that it took SOOOO long for them to do something SOOOO obvious to keep in touch with their users--but it's progress, even so.)
 
My bad: a CW fan just pointed out to me that the very first link on the Cyberwings Status page is a Q&A, which is basically a FAQ. It's a few days old, but still substantially accurate.

Sorry for missing this--I unhelpfully forget it wasn't just another chat transcript.
 
Well, after CEO sent out that message to everyone yesterday, I thought things
were looking up. I mean, personally, I am 100% behind CEO. He walks it like he
talks it, and he offers REALLY good deals. As far as I am concerned that's all I
need to know. But still, the slow servers issue seemed to be continuing, so I wrote
him about that last night and just got this back:

Kwad,

Thanks for the kind words about the generic email I sent out yesterday. As a matter
of fact, I DID work pretty hard on that, and I think it answers every question anyone
has ever had in about as minute detail as possible. Still, as you say, there seem
to be some issues with the slow servers. After you wrote, I had the IS guy check (the
IS guy is REALLY
excellent, by the way. He is only 52 credits from his BS in Economics, and as you know
you wind up learning a lot about CS in Economics these days. I was skeptical, but he
was cheap [remember: got to keep costs in line] and when I found out he not only
had installed Linux on over twelve different platforms, but had also modified the "man"
pages on each of those installs to reflect custom alias commands he'd implemented,
I was, as you might imagine, quick to snap him up).

Anyway, he has traced it to problems with the USB ethernet cards we are using. As I mentioned
before, we never skimp when outfitting our servers. When we went for the original installation,
I had some ripoff artist at Blackstone try to tell us how to set them up, but then I talked
to one of the consultants at the local Fry's and he showed me these USB ethernet adaptors
that do the job without having to open the box or use a PCI slot. This is very important because
our servers, due to rack mounting, have limited PCI slots (2) and we've already filled those
with a Soundblaster Live! (not Live! value, but the real deal) and a Promise Ultra33 card that
helps us get around the 2Gb hard drive BIOS limitation on the motherboard. Anyway, the USB
ethernet cards installed OK, but apparently there is some data bandwidth limitation with USB 1.
We are in the process of seeing if your motherboard can be upgraded to USB 1.1, which I am
told will up the USB throughput to a full 11Mbps. After this upgrade, my IS guy assures me that
the slow server problem will be fixed.

I will keep you informed as I hear more, but I am sure you can tell from the above that we have
the problem fully under control, and that we are working hard to be among the best server
sites in the lower 48 states.

CEO

 
CEO-Shawn: Talks with LS are not going well, services are not active at this moment. I may be flying to Maine immediately to pickup our servers and plug them back in in Virginia tonight. We already have Class C's in Virginia ready to roll. Not sure yet how things will turn out, but we are all HOT under the collars today.


Hot under the collars eh? I just want my money back...
 
^^ Yet again, a platinum member illustrates very clearly that it doesn't take brains to get high post counts at Anandtech.


satire is wasted on those so gullible.
 
I forwarded the comments in this thread to shawn and he told me to f*ck off and die then he sent me klez
 
Actually, all of the best data centers use USB ethernet cards. If you don't know what you're talking about, then maybe you just shouldn't say ANYTHING!!

PCI ethernet on a Web server... now THAT's funny.

 
Aceman, un-edit your note! Others want to see your incredulous and upset response to CEO's comments as helpfully forwarded by Kwad! 🙂


As someone who supports CW and wants it to succeed (time will tell), I have found the responses to Kwad's messages simply astonishing. Almost unimaginable.

And MOST of the responses, it heartens me to say, have been from CW critics! 🙂

Kwad, we all owe you big time! Effective metasarcasm--often tried, rarely works!
 
rolleye.gif


OK guys, lighten up!

You all got "lifetime" accounts for next to nothing and now you are complaining about what you get for nothing?
Admittedly, I sent in my $10 for the dual, turbo, lifetime, ultra-incredible, too-good-to-be-true, supercalafragilisticexpidocious<sic> web hosting.
I knew better than to host my precious .com with CyberHotWings and allow them control of my e-mail sweep...

Now, I'll just pay my $50 to Hostica (I waited several months before doing the actual switch to Hostica, as I have been burned several times in the past...such as PSN.net & (now, I Can't RS (remember the others 😉 ))....

Anyway, Wolfgang "nailed it"!
Let's all just wait and see if the three days of down-time "someday soon" will transpire as stated.
Jeez, if I was Shawn (or whatever his name is) I'd take a hike with ALL of the $ after reading some of the diatribes posted here.

"Ve get too soon oldt and too late schmart" says an old German proverb... I may just be $10 smarter.
 
Originally posted by: llew
Here's a pic of the ceo in case anyone is interested. Here is a better link.
Click to expand...

Wait a minute guys.....

web archive site... did you see the webring banner at the bottom of the page? "Gay men of Maine" ??

After seeing that.... I noticed one of the main links on the page.. "My Personal Ad to the World - Any sincere men left out there??" I thought Shawn said he has a wife?

I would have to think that "web.archive.org" is pretty legitimate.. right?

Interesting 🙂
-Eddie

EDIT:
Also some interesting info in http://web.archive.org/web/19991008153618/www.cyberwings.com/swhite/aboutme.htm .. talks about his job as a purchaser in a Biotech company in southern Maine 🙂
 
They actually use USB ethernet for web servers? USB is limited to the speed of the USB bus, which is pretty slow compared to PCI. That's why they have Gigabit ethernet PCI cards right? Why would a web server need a sound card anyways? And a good one in fact, "the real deal Live!" like he mentioned. He's not listening music or playing games on it I hope. Just confused about his letter to kwad.
 
You obviously don't know ANYTHING about Maine. Due to the cross matrix of the data center fat pipe in New England (and, in particular, Maine), you HAVE to use USB ethernet connectors, otherwise you're going to be operating the entire backbone at HALF DUPLEX, and you'll get 16-bit sound from the servers AT BEST.

Please. Use your brain.


 
I am SO happy that I am not using Cyberwings for serious hosting. I am definately only getting my $3 worth. I thinks I can do a better job of hosting. Luckily, i find a sick humor in this whole situation and I don't really care what happens.
 
^^ Yet again, a golden member illustrates very clearly that it doesn't take brains to get high post counts at Anandtech. Perhaps this one will not edit his post de facto so as to remove the material for my laughter.

Keep it up Kwad
 
They actually use USB ethernet for web servers? USB is limited to the speed of the USB bus, which is pretty slow compared to PCI. That's why they have Gigabit ethernet PCI cards right? Why would a web server need a sound card anyways? And a good one in fact, "the real deal Live!" like he mentioned. He's not listening music or playing games on it I hope. Just confused about his letter to kwad.

LOL!
 
hey ace, while trolling about I stumbled on some nice swamp property you might be interested in. Bettter yet, how about a lifetime reseller plan with cyberwings today only for 200$. It is all yours, better yet, order in the next hour and I 5x zap that order and throw in 5 usb cards to increase server stability.

 
Got another email from CEO. He has asked me to forward it to this discussion...

Kwad,

Thanks again for keeping me informed about the discussion going on. I would like
to be able to read those messages myself, but as I've told several people, right now
I am knee deep in desoldering stations and wires. We have to move the servers by
hand, and before that can be accomplished, I have to desolder the north junction on
each motherboard to keep the data from flowing. This is the only failsafe way to ensure
that when I bring the server down physically, that we don't get a data overrun that
will invoke a parity error in the slave IDE bus. (This is a little known issue with all
Intel chipset motherboards; I hadn't heard about it either until someone at the tech
desk at Fry's alerted me). Anyway, I have almost finished disconnecting the north junctions
on most of the boards, and then soldering in a capacitive bypass to hold them until
they are powered up again. Apparently, there is a 2-3% failure rate in reversing the
procedure if you do it right, so I want to DO IT RIGHT. That's part of the reason things are taking so long.

As for the person who asked about the Ultra33 card (this is the expensive Promise IDE
card, not some cheap ripoff): You clearly do not understand motherboards. Most motherboards,
even the most modern ones, use only a kludge to circumvent the intrinsic 2Gb limit. Most
motherboards get around this limit by a method called "Cylinder Rotation", whereby the
motherboard itself compresses the bits to get them onto the hard drive, and the hard
drive is then tricked to uncompressing those bits on the fly. This is very inefficient, and easily
leads to data errors. The Promise Ultra33 card is the ONLY card on the market that
does things right. It slows down the bits so they can be written to the drive correctly and
without problems. Other Promise cards (Ultra 66, Ultra 100, Ultra 133) don't slow down the
bits properly, and can lead to errors. When you are building a state of the art cluster, you
have to pay attention to EVERY factor that can affect the quality of the bits going onto the
hard drives.

I will also note that originally we had these servers outfitted with both a Soundblaster Live
AND a GeForce3 video card. This was good for framerates for Quake and other games that our
volunteer IS staff likes to play on the servers (only when traffic is low, don't worry). But because
we ran out of PCI slots when we went to bigger drives and needed the second PCI slot
for the Ultra33 card, we had to sell off the GeForce3 cards. Now the IS people complain, because
the on-board graphics is only a 2Mb video "card", but until we get our entire cluster on a wireless
HPNA 2.0 backbone (planned for later this summer), and then move the hard drive
to a USB 1.1 external box (and free up the second PCI slot for a state of the art video card)
we will have to make do.

Please post this, and I hope this lets people know where we are, and why things are taking
a bit more time than expected. You can also remind them that a lot of them paid only $3-8 for
their Websites, which is barely the price of lunch. And I don't see anyone complaining that lunch
doesn't last forever, or that sometimes the food takes a bit longer to prepare.

Yours,

CEO
 
Kwad - TOO FU<KING FUNNY!!!!!! i think i choked up some lunch laughing so hard hehee

i'll admit to buying a cyberwings acct for sh!ts and giggles, and i'm personally not going nutso like some people are over this. i use my space to serve up small sites. people need to learn from the old adage "YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR." if you want more reliable webhosting service, go with a heavy hitter like Hostway or something. 😛

 
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