We’re back online, for the moment. I’m going to post about the outage first so that I can get it off my chest. Then will come the post about our trip to Victoria.
It all started when I tried to check the ii News website on Wednesday evening last week from Mom and Dad’s house…
The website didn’t respond. This isn’t the first time. I am not running some sort of four-star data centre here, just a Mac Mini with Mac OS X Server running. I don’t have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), which means that when the power fails, the Mac shuts off and doesn’t come back on without a manual restart. When the website didn’t respond but the security camera was working, I knew that the house hadn’t burnt down. There had been reports of a really severe lightning storm in Calgary, so I supposed that the power had gone down and the computer was off.
Then I started getting email bouncing when I sent messages to Tammy. That was weird, but I knew that Hover had sent me a message that they were changing their email hosting, so I figured it was temporary. Anyways, I was on vacation, dammit!
When we came in the door after vacation, the first thing I saw was that the power light was ON on the Mac. That made me wonder if my assumptions had been wrong. The next logical step was that the dynamic domain name service (DNS) that I use was configured wrong. Every once in a while, Shaw does assign our home a different IP address, and sometimes that results in the DNS pointing to the wrong place. It usually just requires a hop onto the Dyn.com website and clicking a couple of buttons to fix. When I went to the website, I was shocked to find a message that my account had been suspended due to a violation of their acceptable use policy.
Wha?
They didn’t have a 1-800 number, but there was a form to fill out. I did. And that started days of frustration, peaking yesterday afternoon. Dyn asserted that I issued a credit card chargeback against them. I have done no such thing. During the last couple of days:
- I found out that my @shaw email address has been inactive since June 1 of last year. And that was my contact email for Dyn…
- I confirmed with Visa that no such chargeback had been issued.
Once the email link was re-established, then I started getting the emails from Dyn again, but they didn’t help much. How do you prove a negative? I needed to convince them that I hadn’t done something.
In the end, it was Tammy who saved the day as usual. She contacted the Dyn enterprise sales line, who put me in contact with their customer service people. The customer service manager reviewed the case and turned my service back on and will investigate the chargeback with the credit card processor.
If the site goes dark again in a month, it will be because Dyn shut me down again, and I will be in the process of moving this site to a different setup.
Wow!!!
Glad you are back.
For the record, I have set up a test WordPress server and started poking around with it. Migrating twelve years of posts and pictures won’t be easy, though.
Okay, here’s what really happened. Finally, Dyn let me know the last four numbers of the card that had issued the chargeback and it was Jackson’s card. He had given me it to attach to the account for the renewals of the survivorsedge.ca website, which I also host for him. At the end of June, he had been the victim of credit card fraud, and when going through the record with Visa, he didn’t recognize the automatic renewal charge from Dyn and marked it as part of the fraud. Hence a chargeback. Hence my website being shut down.
I spoke with Jackson tonight and explained it to him and he is going to call Visa in the morning. I will be paying the original invoice and any additional charges, because it’s my fault this all happened. Fault by negligence is still fault. I have removed Jackson’s card from the account (actually I did it as soon as I regained my access to the account and I was surprised to see it there) and I am receiving email on my contact account now. I notified Dyn that the chargeback will be reversed.
Sigh. I’ll be glad when it’s all over.