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I'm not a big fan of the tone, either, however, jacquesm is spot-on in his assessment. For one thing, my understanding of Rackspace's business practices -- and I've only dealt with them peripherally, so I might be a bit wrong here -- is that they "manage" things like their network, and the actual server hardware, and stuff like that. So, if you want a CPU upgrade, sure, they'll do that. If you need your server rebooted, they'll do that too. But, they don't have anyone sitting there monitoring your system's performance metrics and doing your sysadmin duties for you. The way I read it, Rackspace did do their job: they upgraded the hardware. It was up to the server admin -- not Rackspace -- to check that the software was then configured correctly. And finally, I don't generally agree with statements of the form, "If you don't know X, you shouldn't be doing Y", but ... looking at dmesg and top are both really, really, really standard sysadmin operations. Entry level stuff, really. Sysadmin work doesn't just mean messing around with Apache's configuration; there are many more nuances, and it's likely that their system is vulnerable to problems that they don't even know about. |
This is typical with what I think is a real problem in society, the 'externalization of blame'.
Inability to see your own responsibility is a serious issue, and it is really pervasive. If I were in the OPs position I would be headbutting a piece of concrete for 20 minutes to make sure I never ever make a mistake like that again, and I would thank rackspace for finally finding the fault that I could have noticed in 5 minutes two years ago.
That's why you have post-delivery checklists, burn in tools and inventory management, staples of everybody that has # on machines that do customer work.
I'll try to keep my 'tone' better under control, apologies for that.
At least it wasn't in Dutch ;)