Rants – Being There

GoDaddy… Just Say No!

Was just reminded why I tell everyone to avoid GoDaddy like the plague. Aside from the fact that it took two hours with tech support to forward a domain, and the chat interface repeatedly timing out (even while I was typing to tech support) forcing me to keep refreshing it, there is a much more troubling issue.

Their security is absolutely atrocious!

On the way to the ridiculously long interaction with tech support, their system became suspicious of my logging in with five different browsers trying to get a simple domain forward to work, and began requiring I provide a confirmation number which they forwarded to the contact email address on record. Fine and dandy.

What isn’t so fine and dandy is that the email address on record was used as contact on more than one GoDaddy account. Now, there’s normally nothing wrong at all with using your email address on more than one account, but I would caution against it on GoDaddy.

I entered credentials for the account, had GoDaddy send the confirmation number, entered the number, and was logged into a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ACCOUNT… Yes, they gave me complete control of someone else’s account.

Without entering ANY of the credentials for the other account!

GoDaddy… Just Say No!

CrashPlan Still Sucks

Backup software that tells you it’s backing up your stuff when it isn’t SUCKS.

Seems CrashPlan still hasn’t fixed the wonderful feature I ran into a couple years ago where you hit a magic limit and your backups stop working…. while their software continues to send you weekly emails telling you that your stuff is all backed up.

It makes perfect sense that they need to use resources (RAM) to keep track of whether or not a file that’s being tracked has changed. If you have a large number of files, that can mean a LARGE amount of resources.

Their software has a default limit on the amount of RAM it will use to track changed files. No problem with that.

When their software hits that limit, and cannot allocate the memory it needs, it crashes, writes a restart.yyyy-mm-dd_hh.mm.ss.log file in the folder where the binary is installed. Then it restarts… without telling you it’s crashed. I DO have a problem with that.

In fact, this morning, when I needed to restore something, I discovered that I have a problem with another machine that hit that limit a few months ago. No, the most recent version of CrashPlan does NOT detect that this has happened. I’d complain and ask that they do this again, but they obviously don’t care enough about the issue to have done anything about it.

Other than that problem I like using CrashPlan, so I’ve written some scripts that run weekly that let me know if this has happened. I suggested that they needed to do this, but, at least in the most recent version I’m aware of, they have not done anything to address the problem.

AHS FINALLY Gets It Right

So, we’ve gotten to the first week of 2019, and I can finally lay to rest the American Home Shield service request that started last June.

Seems that any form of contact with AHS other than social media is useless. After getting two more bills telling me I owed them for an extra service call they never made, and getting no response from the person that had finally gotten the HVAC fixed, I went after them on Twitter and Facebook, and got responses on both within a couple of hours.

I was told the exact same thing, pretty much word for word (must have been reading the same script), about it being fixed and I’d see my account corrected online in a couple of days… but this time they actually did it!

So, fingers crossed, we’re actually done. System is working. And if I go back and look at the amount of time I’ve invested getting to this point, I would have come out way ahead had I worked those hours and paid for it myself.