Checks are insecure, inconvenient and pretty useless in today's electronic world. For non-electronical purposes you can just use cash.
And what happens when systems go down? Power goes out? Electronic transactions are blocked/denied/lost for any reason? What then?
No, no, I'm afraid paper money (currency, checks, notes) will be here to stay, for many, many decades to come.
I've said this many times here before, and I'll say it again... don't let them see anything other than the delivery envelope (headers) of your email. They can't legally open your postal mail, so treat it the same: gpg/PGP-encrypt your emails; all of them.
If a recipient you email frequently doesn't know how to use encryption, teach them. There are plugins for Firefox, Gmail, Thunderbird, Mail.app, and dozens of other mail clients.
If it's someone you don't converse over email with often, then it's probably not worth protecting anyway.
Seriously...
Learn to create, protect and use your gpg keys and your keychain. It's not that hard, and the benefits far outweigh the minutes of work and learning it takes to incorporate it into your daily workflow.
I appreciate your concern, but sendmail is definitely not the issue causing the load to skyrocket. I've already tested that by shutting down sendmail right before the window when I know it's going to happen, and it happens anyway. Besides, if sendmail is already refusing connections due to the load, then sendmail itself isn't the problem.
I'm already 30GB into the rsync of the data. I run rsnapshot on an hourly basis to my Drobo here for near-line backups, but the Drobo just ate 1.5TB of my data (dangerous device to rely on, and the company line is to always back up your Drobo to... another Drobo). So I have to pull the data clean from the server to another storage array here, otherwise the backup would have been incremental.
Once that is done, I'll be terminating my contract. These rampant, unexplained outages are infuriating, and my users, clients and customers are pissed off, and so am I.
"When there is a problem, you call the landlord to come fix it. Yes, you have the right of sole use of the property, but you can't reasonably expect him to fix the problem without allowing him access to the property."
To continue with your analogy, this is like telling the landlord that there's a problem with the lawn, and he demands to have a copy of the keys to my home office desk drawers to fix it.
Yes, they "rent" a KVM to customers for $35.00/USD for a 24-hour period, unfortunately...
In this case, to break the standoff between myself and the hosting provider, I yielded and had them invoice me for the $35 so I could get the server up, rip the data off of it, terminate my services with them and go after them for financial compensation for the damages, downtime (12 day outage 2 months ago without an apology), etc.
"In any event, tuning should be able to prevent that from knocking the box over completely, allowing you to stay logged in and see what's going on."
If absolutely nothing changed other than the IP and physical datacenter the hardware was located in, and the problems every other Sunday only started after the physical machine was relocated, how could it possibly be the OS or applications?
The network graphs clearly show external activity flooding the machine with connections that never complete. I'd show you the graphs, but my server is down at the moment.
I understand where you're coming from, but knowing that it's every other Sunday, I've even shut down any and all apps, cron, etc. and just watched it, and it still happens, consistently. It's like clockwork, and it's not the OS or its configuration, because this never happened when I was in the old dc.
"Stop being a jerk and cooperate with the owners of the machine you are renting or take your data elsewhere."
Apparently it's not their machine either, as they lease the hardware from someone else. I asked them to pull the primary drive in the system and overnight it to me and bill me for it, and they refused, stating that it is leased equipment and they do not own it.
Basically I am leasing a physical server from company (A) who is leasing it from company (B), and that too may not be the end of the line. (B) may not own it either, and they may be colocating hardware from company (C) or (D) somewhere in there.
So whose TOS am I subject to here? Who is violating whose laws? It gets curiouser and curiouser the more I dig into it.
"If you want full control over your hardware, you need to talk to the sales team and tell them that you want an unmanaged plan. The trade-off, of course, is that you have to deal with your own "WTF" problems from then on."
This IS an unmanaged plan. All the provide is ping and power, I do the rest. I manage the OS, the configuration and everything else. This is not VPS, I lease a physical server, and they don't touch it.
"I trust the techs of the company I'm hosting with so I don't mind giving up root access to chase this problem down. What I do after that is change the root pass again and I'm done."
How am I expected to change the root password to let them in, when they've denied me access to the server unless I hand over the current root password? They're not asking for logs, they're demanding the root password; those are two very-different issues entirely.
They're also denying me KVM access, unless I pay $35.00 for it, so I can go in and fix the networking they changed when they moved my drive to a completely different chassis without my knowledge or approval.
"Give them an account with limited sudo access to view your logs."
I can't do that, since they are now prohibiting me access to my server unless I hand over the root password. They're not asking for logs, they're asking for the password to the 'root' account.
"If that won't do, then provide them with the necessary logs. If that's not good enough, don't expect support and move your stuff to some place that doesn't provide the level of support you're paying for."
I pay several thousand dollars a year for their disgusting service, and am going to be migrating away ASAP. Again, they're not asking for logs, they're demanding root. Two very different things.
Right now, they won't give me KVM access so I can log in remotely and fix the networking they broke, so I can get my server back online. It's been down 2 days now because of this.
"Switch providers. Plenty offer remote reboot and serial console or KVM for both VMs or physical servers, which would allow you to go crazy with custom encrypted partitions etc."
They offer KVM access, at $35.00/day, which in this case I refuse to pay to fix what they broke, outside of the context of the server. They migrated me from one chassis to another with completely different hardware, causing my machine to go offline. They want me to pay $35.00 for 24-hours of KVM access to reconfigure the network to support the hardware they moved things to.
Alternately, they want me to hand over the root password (not a privileged account, but THE root password), so they can do it themselves. Since I installed, configured and manage the OS entirely on this machine, and they've demonstrated their ineptitude before, I'm not giving them root. Ever.
"I'd also like to know how you *know* it's a hardware or network issue outside of your server. How do you know it's not your NIC driver hanging up? Older e1000 drivers (super common card in the hosting industry) are quite flaky. What research have you done outside of your internal monitoring?"
Because this server has been running 24x7 for about 3 years without a single outstanding issue. When they migrated it from Savvis to some datacenter in Dallas 2 months ago, I've had no less than 20 separate outages , while the underlying OS and application stack itself has not changed in any way to facilitate those outages.
In every single case, they demand that I give them the root password, so they can diagnose the issues on the machine. In every single case, I've shown them nagios, ntop, hotsanic, sar, etc. logs demonstrating that the OS itself is not the cause of the outages.
For example, since this migration to Dallas, every other Sunday between 7:00am and 8:00am EST, my server's load goes over 100 as incoming connections spike over 700/sec., sendmail refuses connections due to the load, and the box seizes up. The logs show that the connections are established and then hang. NOTHING on the machine triggers every other Sunday between these hours that would cause that.
Only a few days ago, they indicated that the NIC on the server may be causing the issues. I'm down 2-3 hours every other Sunday because of this.
They're not asking for the logs, they're asking for root. That's a completely separate (and unacceptable) solution to their own problems outside of the box itself.
"How do they root your box? If your company is like mine, they can't simply reboot the box and log in via singles to gain root access, so how is it possible that they even get in? Are you suggesting that they hack it somehow to gain root access?"
They have KVM access and forcibly reboot the server, and when it comes back up, they enter it in single-user mode. They've done this at least 3 times before, while I was logged into it, and when the server came back up about 15 minutes later, the lastlog for my own login was missing from the logs. They attempted to clean up the logs to hide their own activities.
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
