Please be more specific, accurate and consistent in your communications

[tkraffty]

I'm still here, sitting helplessly through another outage (nearly an hour of down-time) - during the busiest hours of one of the busiest weekdays - and I don't know what to tell my customers about it, since I told them YESTERDAY that the firewall updates were going to be completed YESTERDAY - based on YOUR post from early Thursday.

This has been the most annoying and costly problem I've experienced at Vortech/Matrix since signing-up almost two years ago.

You and your support staff MUST be more specific and accurate in your communications with your resellers. Here's an example from a recent issue:

On Sunday (01-25-2004, 08:20 PM), Brad posted the following item regarding installation of new firewall hardware:

"We will update this post and send out a notice once we have a firm date and time and will give 24 to 48 hour notice for this. We will also do this later at night to also reduce impact of the short downtime it will cause to put it in to service."

[b]The next communication we received on this subject was posted by Craig a few days later (Thursday, 01-29-2004, 11:59 AM) while the updates were underway - giving us none of the advance notice nor the evening schedule we were expecting based on the above previous post --

"Today we will be finalizing installation for the 2 Cisco PIX 520 firewalls... This may cause short periods of network downtime for the next 3 hours..."

And later that same day, the following message was also posted by Craig - which actually says the "finalizing" did *not* happen as announced, but will be taking place the following day. No other details were provided that would help us understand what is happening or to better inform our customers of potential impacts. The thread was also closed, preventing any further discussion of this issue.

"We have all the system moved out of the rack that need to be moved to make room for the 2 new firewalls, we have not made the switch over yet. This should happen tomorrow. There should not be very much downtime for this."

The above excerpts have been included here to simply make a point: If you are going to provide your resellers and customers with information they need to run their businesses and which is absolutely essential to maintaining good relations with their customers, then you should be more careful to (1.) be accurate, (2.) be consistent, (3.) provide the same amount of information that you would want to know when communicating with your customers, and (4.) provide an explanation if you fail to do any of the above.

More simply, you need to be more aware of the fact that most of us resellers are using the information you provide us to communicate with our own customers. Every time you say something other than what you actually end up doing, you not only look bad to us - your customers - but you also make us look bad to ours.

I hope you understand this is pretty much the only on-going issue I've had with Vortech/Matrix and I'm only posting this in the hopes that BOTH our business efforts (yours and your resellers') might be further improved.

[somereseller]

Agreed, I'm freaking out because we have a site launch this weekend and anything can happen at any time. This constant instability and inaccurate informations is a real pain even if we all know that sometimes things have to be fixed asap. Seems that the only solution is to put our good customers elsewhere.

[Vixen]

There was an update posted last night AND an email announcement sent out saying the firewalls would be installed today from 11am - 1pm ET. However, the techs decided the to install them after 5pm ET in an effort to appease all of you. As I can see, that effort did not work either and you are going to complain regardless.

[logic404]

I'm not even quite sure how you would go about this, but...

is it technically feasable to have your "important" sites resolve to two different places? Like, use Matrix as the main one, and have some space purchased somewhere else, and if Matrix is down, then it resolves to the other space? The concept being that the likelihood that they're both down during the same small period of time is fairly low? Or am I just dreaming? Just thought it could be a good idea for all those absolutely mission critical sites.

And to put my two cents in to the main discussion topic, I see all of this as being part of the router issue that began last week ( and I'm probably completely wrong) - if it's going to be down anyway, I'm not quite sure that I care *when* it is - just so long as at the end of it all, it's nicely fixed so it won't happen again (all indications from Brad, et. all seem to indicate that this will be the case). And, maybe I'm bad, but I haven't been emailing my customers every single thing that Vortech says because:
a) It changes as often as the situation does
b) Most of them aren't sitting there monitoring their sites anyway
c) If Vortech did do it in their night time, it would be the middle of my business day, which isn't something I want to advertise.

As I said, just my two c.

[somereseller]

Effort...If you had told us, then we would have known what it was about. Simple as that.

And I don't call 45 minutes of downtime "minimal downtime" as seen in your announcement.

[jmbeach]

Originally Posted by Vixen

There was an update posted last night AND an email announcement sent out saying the firewalls would be installed today from 11am - 1pm ET. However, the techs decided the to install them after 5pm ET in an effort to appease all of you. As I can see, that effort did not work either and you are going to complain regardless.

Actually, changing the time without warning is the worst thing that can be done. Consider this - we ready ourselves and our customers for a set outtage. That outtage comes and goes. We think it's already done. Then BLAM, the real outtage.

At least a post earlier today would have been good. I know you guys are working hard right now, but no avoidable surprises, please

[Vixen]

Originally Posted by somereseller

Effort...If you had told us, then we would have known what it was about. Simple as that.

And I don't call 45 minutes of downtime "minimal downtime" as seen in your announcement.

Yea, we are making an effort to fix the issues but nothing is ever good enough. Got it.

[jmbeach]

oh, on a side note... how did the installation go?

[Vixen]

You will have to wait for Brad or one of the other boys to get back because I have no clue at this point.

[shahed]

I thought it will be 10 min downtime, looks like everything was down for 1 hour. since last week 2 of my customer left.
Vortech needs to step up

[tkraffty]

You're correct about the e-mail sent out at 8PM last night. I did not see that. However, the Server Status thread which I've been monitoring does NOT appear to be updated with anything other than the messages I cited above - unless the post was made somewhere else.

Given the state of e-mail and my flooded Inbox these days, I was trying to get my updates and information from the forums.

However, you've still only proved the point of my message by saying the techs decided to do something different.

Your communications must be specific, consistent (including forums posts in the correct areas and threads), and once you post something, please either stick to it explicitly OR make sure everyone knows something different is going to happen.

I'm one of the gripiest resellers here, but I'm still 100-times more tolerant of these issues than ANY of my end-customers are. If you tell us something - then we are likely to pass along the same information to our customers... and THEY don't waste time like I do griping whenever I have to send two or three follow-up messages saying "Oops - not now, but later... Oops. not later, but now... Oops forget all that I said before 'cause we're making the update some other time..."

Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it for my customers. I complain a lot, but I doubt you (vortech/matrix) are seeing a 10% reduction in your monthly revenue like I am from all this mis-communication and unprofessional appearances.

[dombort]

Logic 404 - Yeah, I've also wondered about that.. kind of like having your A records work like MX records priority.

If anyone knows tell me if this works:

1. Have your ns1 set to your matrix nameserver (ie. ns1.mymatrixnameserver.com)
2. Have your ns2 set to another hosted nameserver somewhere else (ie. ns2.myotherhostnameserver.com)

This would handle the cases when the hspehere nameservers go down (which I guess is not as often as when a given server goes down) ...but still, in the case of catastrophic downtime (like the router problem) you would be redirected to the second nameserver and then to your site hosted on a backup server.


anyone.?

[resell01]

Yes this can be done, we are working with a system now that does that. Just trying to work out the bugs....

[logic404]

Dom,

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that that would work (that's the whole idea of having more than 1 DNS server). But I can't quite get a handle on how to do it when the DNS server is up, but the web server is down?

But I'm sure there must be a way to do it.
resell01 - Any comment?

[jmbeach]

Originally Posted by dombort

Logic 404 - Yeah, I've also wondered about that.. kind of like having your A records work like MX records priority.

If anyone knows tell me if this works:

1. Have your ns1 set to your matrix nameserver (ie. ns1.mymatrixnameserver.com)
2. Have your ns2 set to another hosted nameserver somewhere else (ie. ns2.myotherhostnameserver.com)

This would handle the cases when the hspehere nameservers go down (which I guess is not as often as when a given server goes down) ...but still, in the case of catastrophic downtime (like the router problem) you would be redirected to the second nameserver and then to your site hosted on a backup server.


anyone.?

dom (you don't mind if I call you dom, do you?)

I think this kind of redundency is possible, but I think you'd want ns1, ns2 to be at one host, and ns3, ns4 at another.

**Edit**
Okay, redundant post - see redundency really does work!