Well, today has been crap.
First of all, my ISP is getting taken over by another ISP, and I've had to stuff around trying to make arrangements for a new ISP that will still provide me with a static IP for a reasonable price. Eventually, I was happy to settle with TPG, and dealing with them wasn't as painful as it might have been. So in the end, I guess I'm happy.
Expect some downtime over the next week or two.
Then, out of the blue, this bloke rings me up, rattles off the specifications for my server and says that it might have a faulty power supply and that Dell is going to send a technician from Unisys to replace it.
Coupled with the fact that I've been getting prank calls for the last month or two, I wasn't immediately inclined to answer his question “so, what is the address that your server is located?”. I say, “Mate, I have no idea who you are, and you've just rung me out of the blue asking for the address that my server is located so you can send someone over to look at it”. Then he started stuttering, “Um, er, well I am from Dell. Er, I can send you an e-mail if you want.. um..”. In the end I decided that it wasn't worth the hassle. Anyway, it just felt suss. I gave him my address eventually, I had his phone numbers on caller ID, and it seemed legitimate enough. I got a commitment from him that he would send me an e-mail as well. I guess if the e-mail doesn't arrive from Dell I can always call the police, etc. (which I guess is not likely to be necessary).
He says, “someone from Unisys will be in contact with you over the next month”. “The next month?“ I ask. “What's the problem with my server? Should I be worried about it catching fire? Why is it going to take a month?”. Then he says that the problem isn't really 'serious' and the worst case situation is that it just stops working, and that Dell is simply doing this as a preventative measure. That may be the case, but it still feels remarkably fishy to me.
I guess I'm just paranoid.
John.
Try Exetel, i get a static ip with them, and its fairly cheap, im on $35 a month for 256k line and I think their prices increase about $10 a month for each factor of 2 in speed. service seems pretty good except I had a hassle with telstra not connection me for ages, but I guess that is telstras fault