whats goin on with Paintballcity.com?

[Aliens-8-MyDad]

well i was makin deals on buyin stuff then it goes out on/off i can access it but for this last week i haven been able to get in at all! anyone else havin problems or is there something in need to do on my end to make it work?

[HoppysMag]

i cant get on ether:confused:

[cledford]

Paintball City is PATHETIC!!!!!! I have not been able to access a single page there in weeks due to the incredibly long download times - this is over a 100Mbps link straight into our core backbone routers!

They had a very, VERY lame presentation at the IAO trade conference that actually made me cringe they mangled things so badly. Coming from a web-hosting and bandwidth provider I'm a little more savvy then the average Joe - but anyone could see that they were absolute LOSERS - WITH 0 TECHNICAL ABILTY. I shudder at what we had to endure while they pitched their site.

They even introduced their new "CTO" who was some punk with a little background in web technologies - but not a "CTO" by any means.

-Calvin

[WhoDaresPlay]

Paintballcity had a poor display at IAO? Whatcha talking about Willis?

Jim is at AC NPPL and might not even know (or care) that PBC is down.

[cledford]

Originally posted by WhoDaresPlay
Paintballcity had a poor display at IAO? Whatcha talking about Willis?

Jim is at AC NPPL and might not even know (or care) that PBC is down.

I'm referring to the little presentation they did at the IAO Industry Conference. It was basically a sales pitch to get the vendors present to buy into advertising packages. These packages were based on the "value" that was inherent to the number of hits they get daily. Personally I can never get on, and won't even waste time trying anymore.

Regarding "Jim" - if he is the admin of the site and does not know it is down (especially when in a metropolitan area) he is a TERRIBLE sysadmin and should not be involved in the management of a commercial site - period.

Regarding the site being down - just another sign of their unprofessionalism. It takes more then appointing fancy titles like CTO or CIO to run a technology based business. There is virtually NO EXCUSE for a well run and administered site to ever go down. We might not be talking about a site like barnesandnoble.com (one of our clients) but the same rules apply - you don't sell what you can't effectively provide.

PBCity is a joke.

-Calvin

[Aliens-8-MyDad]

well i sent my money and now i dont really have a way of contacting them... which is partialy my part casue i coulda wrote down there stuff, but i relied on the PM's and now i cant access them... guess i just got too comfortable with the secrity and stability of AO

[WhoDaresPlay]

Originally posted by cledford
We might not be talking about a site like barnesandnoble.com (one of our clients) but the same rules apply - you don't sell what you can't effectively provide.

Irony... Jim's server is in the same "pen" as B&N.

[cledford]

Originally posted by WhoDaresPlay


Irony... Jim's server is in the same "pen" as B&N.

What exactly are you talking about? Same pen? What is a pen?

If you're trying to say that their server is located in our hosting facility, I'd beg to differ - or at least our name server does not know about it. Here are nslookups on barnesandnoble.com, www.paintballcity.com, forums.paintballcity.com, and paintballcity.com.

What IP address do you have for any of the above PBCity addresses? what is the IP of the nameserver you resolved against?

-Calvin


C:\>nslookup
Default Server: resolver.isc.cw.net
Address: 204.70.138.70

> barnesandnoble.com
Server: resolver.isc.cw.net
Address: 204.70.138.70

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: barnesandnoble.com
Addresses: 208.158.245.140, 208.237.178.21

> paintballcity.com
Server: resolver.isc.cw.net
Address: 204.70.138.70

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to resolver.isc.cw.net timed-out
> www.paintballcity.com
Server: resolver.isc.cw.net
Address: 204.70.138.70

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to resolver.isc.cw.net timed-out
> forums.paintballcity.com
Server: resolver.isc.cw.net
Address: 204.70.138.70

DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to resolver.isc.cw.net timed-out
>

[cphilip]

LOL!!! Calvin, don't hold back! Tell us how you realy feel!! :D

[Junky]

I think he might be talking about Jim saying they are using the same pipe as Barnes&noble in regards to how fast they are now...I do remember Jim saying that somewhere, as if they still are I do not know.

[cledford]

Couple of things. First Paintball City DOES NOT use the same pipe/hosting organization as Barnes & Noble - see below.

Second, PBCity has posted an explanation for why they are still down. It is poorly written, grammatically a disaster, and technically a farce - but it is an explanation. I'm posting that below as well.

My only comment is that for the only paintball forum that CHARGED they have got to be the most unprofessionally run site I've ever run across. It was really amusing reading how they will be implementing "new" changes that have been industry standard for a few years now.

Enjoy,

-Calvin


Hello Everyone, If you’re a regular user of PaintballCity.com (PBC) you have noticed that for the last couple of weeks PBC has been offline. The reason for this letter is to give you an in depth reason for the downtime, changes and additions we've made to the server farm to ensure faster recovery if it ever happens again, and more. What happened? I'd like to say it all started out in early July when one of our Intel Pentium III processors died on our main web server named "Angel". However we have come to believe that the reasons some of these failures have occurred is due to constant patching over the years. At any rate we had some major hardware and software related issue from the hardware dying. First the Intel processor died...when we got that up one of IBM's SCSI hard drives died on our database server (named Studly after my pug) which is in a RAID 5 configuration. Well upon getting the new hard drive the RAID array would not automatically rebuild. We contacted Intel, who now owns ICP Vortex the makers of our RAID card for support and they eventually stopped returning our calls after they turned it over to their engineers. Translation: they were stumped. TO make a long story short we rebuilt the RAID array but all of our backups we corrupted. Thus slowing down the recover process. The solution: If you've been on the site a long time you've been with us for the bumpy road from time to time. We have decided to not just simply patch the server this time around for a fast recovery. We decided to re-plan our server farm, and take the hit on a long recovery to ensure that in the future if this ever happened again that we would be prepared for anything the system threw at us and be up within the hour. Thanks to Adrenalin Products we were able to purchase a new server to act as an "Imaging Server". This server will act very much like the new Windows version of "System Restore". It takes snapshots or images of our server(s) operating system raw data and data and captures it on the server. Now if we ever go down or if we even want to upgrade a new web server to the cluster we can do so easily with our images which are created every 6 hours. This as you can imagine is a huge failsafe. We also realized that no matter how great we thought we had the server(s) things happened and the server would freeze from time to time. So we purchased, the most needed failsafe in my mind, what is called an RPC (Remote Power Management) device. This 2U device is installed in the NOC (Network Operations Center) where the PBC servers reside in our cabinet and allows us to power cycle any machine plugged into it from remote. This literally saves a minimum of 3 hours downtime is something needs to be rebooted because I am at least an hour driving distance to NYC where the servers are located. Not to mention I'm not always able to jump right up and head to the NOC. Well this eliminates that time frame down to less then 5 minutes. We also have beefed up s system called NetSaint that is a network alert system. This system checks all devices on our network every 5 minutes. If a device is not working or not responding correctly as per our settings then the NetSaint system will email myself, James Graley, and Edward Maas immediately. It will also send out SMS text messages to each of our cell phones so that we can either use the RPC to reboot the machine in trouble or take care of it another way. We have also beefed up our backup techniques since they were unsuccessful this restore. Now we backup the system not only on our remote server (named Devil) but on the local NOC Imaging Server as well as tape backup that works off the database server (Studly). Our backups will be tested on a bi-weekly basis to ensure that they will restore correctly when needed. We also created a "Development Server" on the Imaging server. From now on all development work will follow a strict regiment before it is released into a live production PBC. In the past scripts were worked on and tested without traffic on PBC. This posed many problems and some downtime or errors for users. From now on all scripts will be developed and tested via benchmarking software on the dev server before it is released into production. This way we know for sure the changes we make can handle the traffic without error. In a nutshell what does this mean? Basically we realize this downtime sucks but we wanted to ensure that WHEN it happens again we will have the quickest restore possible. The reason I say the word "when" is because with this type of web site we have so many scripting systems and different components that things tend to break down. We have created as many failsafes as we possibly can. Unfortunately we cannot help hardware breakdowns. If something were to happen again in the future we would be at the mercy of the failed hardware's manufacturer for turnaround time on the failed hardware. However in the future as our site grows with Adrenalin we plan on upgrading our servers to systems that can report hardware failures or problems before they happen. We also use RAID systems so that if hard drives fail, and the eventually do when being used on a 24/7 basis, they won't stop the site. New Features! Adrenalin Products has made is possible for us to add new features to the site this time around: 1. Discount to BuyPB.com for all PBC members. 2. Discounts to ALL the major magazine subscriptions for all new members. 3. Lowered subscription prices! 4. PBC 3rd party trading services - PBC Escrow 5. New reviews system 6. A new and improved auctions system is on the way. 7. Improved weather and local field integration. 8. ProPaintball.info is being created as we speak and is going to rock. Wait till you guys get a load of this site. 9. Much more. I hope you all come back to visit our site and we appreciate all of your kind words and support in the emails you sent.

OS, Web Server and Hosting History for www.paintballcity.com

OS Server Last changed IP address Netblock Owner

FreeBSD Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a PHP/4.2.0 12-Sep-2002 128.241.244.6 Verio, Inc.

FreeBSD Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) PHP/4.1.0 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a 30-Mar-2002 128.241.244.6 Verio, Inc.

FreeBSD Apache/1.3.19 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a 17-Jan-2002 128.241.244.6 Verio, Inc.

FreeBSD Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a 7-Sep-2001 209.15.159.100 CommuniTech.Net, Inc.

Linux Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.3pl1 6-Feb-2001 209.15.159.99 CommuniTech.Net, Inc.

Linux Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.2 25-Dec-2000 209.15.159.99 CommuniTech.Net, Inc.

================================================== ================================================== ====================

OS, Web Server and Hosting History for www.barnesandnoble.com

OS Server Last changed IP address Netblock Owner

Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0 17-Oct-2001 208.158.245.140 Cable & Wireless USA

Windows 2000 unknown 16-Oct-2001 208.237.178.21 Barnes & Noble

Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0 20-Aug-2001 208.158.245.140 Cable & Wireless USA

Windows 2000 unknown 19-Aug-2001 208.158.245.140 Cable & Wireless USA

Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0 29-Mar-2001 208.158.245.140 Cable & Wireless USA

Windows 2000 unknown 27-Mar-2001 208.237.178.21 Barnes & Noble

Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0 20-Sep-2000 208.237.178.21 Barnes & Noble

Windows 2000 unknown 19-Sep-2000 208.237.178.21 Barnes & Noble

Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0 26-Aug-2000 208.237.178.21 Barnes & Noble

Windows 2000 unknown 25-Aug-2000 208.237.178.21 Barnes & Noble

[Muzikman]

Are these people running this place really as dumb as they sound? I never went to PBC...and I guess I'm better off:)

[warpfeedmod]

I used to frequent there quite a bit when I had my spyder. I stopped when they started charging, and then about a few months ago they stopped charging and the forums were free again...I was there once, now I can't get back as well.

[WhoDaresPlay]

thanks for copying paintballcity.com's message cledford, I had no idea how to read it on my own. :eek:

[cledford]

Originally posted by WhoDaresPlay
thanks for copying paintballcity.com's message cledford, I had no idea how to read it on my own. :eek:

Very funny. Why the need to make smart-mouthed comments? I posted the message because a) it makes life a little easier for everyone, and b) I figured that access to their site will continue to be up and down.

If you've got a problem with my criticisms of their business then say so. (although regardless of whether you like it I'm right) Don't come here and take cheap shots at me because a couple guys you know can't run a decent web site.

-Calvin

[dansim]

basicly WHO CARES ANYMORE?

[WhoDaresPlay]

Cheap shot?

What happened to the online forums of old where people could post what they felt and not have people get rubbed the wrong way?

I'm not defending PBC, in fact I've been in agreeance with all your previous comments. However after your rash observance of my post I'm siding with dansim.

Who gives a rat's butt? None of us run the site or are associated with it. We all know AOG rules... :D

"People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, cledford."