News Archive

Server Outage

All of Legroom.net was offline from Monday through Wednesday morning. This is because my truly dumbass server colocation provider:

  1. sold me a new colo plan hosted in a data center that was being shut down
  2. neglected to warn me at the time of sale that it was being sut down
  3. neglected to warn me at any point before it was shut down, taking out my server in the process
  4. disconnected technical support / customer service numbers for the data center
  5. failed to mention the shutdown on their website and network status pages (which, btw, was also broken at the time)
  6. failed to respond to the urgent ticket I had submitted about the mysterious server outage in any reasonable amount of time
  7. when they did finally respond, about ten hours later, sent the reply to my e-mail address hosted on the very server that was shut down

Once I finally got someone on the phone, and was informed of the extremely unexpected data center shutdown, I was told that all servers were being moved to their Dallas data center facility. All Chicago customers were supposed to have been notified 60 days ago of the move, which didn't do me a whole lot of good as I wasn't yet a customer 60 days ago. Not that it stopped them from selling service in that data center anyway. Fucktards.

So the server was supposed to be available again Tuesday afternoon. Needless to day, Tuesday afternoon, evening, and night all passed, and still no server. Finally I called again Wednesday morning to see wtf was going on, and was told that the server had already been powered up (since about 9:30pm Tuesday night, according to my logs), but nobody bothered to connect a damn ethernet cable.

Again, fucktards.

Everyone I spoke with during this ordeal (once I finally figured out how to get in contact with them) was polite and seemed genuinely surprised and regretful that I had not been contacted about the relocation, and moving an entire data center in two days is no easy task, so it's hard for me to be upset with them on that level. But the complete and utter lack of notification, the fact that I was sold a plan in a data center that was already scheduled to be shutdown, and the apparently lack of competence necessary to connect an ethernet cable to bring the server back online is just flat out unacceptable.

Alright, I'm finished my rant. For now. Just wanted to let everyone know what happened. With any luck (well, a lot of luck with these people), Legroom.net stay online without any more unexpected outages.

Microsoft Access MDAC detect and install...

I need my script to check for Data Access Objects because my program uses jet to access an Access 97 database. The install works fine on my computer but when I run it on a testbed computer it fails unless I install MDAC. How can I check for this and install it during install if it is needed. Keep in mind the Windows 9xME uses one version and 2K/NT/XP/Vista uses another further complicating things.
Thanks very much if you can help me figure this out!!!

My program is at versehelper.tripod.com for now.

how can i extract this exe.. universal extractor wont do

Hi,

i have this exe file which has drivers on it. I want to extract this file.. but my windows wont let me run it..

I want to extract this file in order to get the files inside it. i ve tried many programs.. none do..

PEID tells me.. this is not a valid PE.

Can you help me.. how to extract this file...??

I believe it is a WISE.

http://driver.mustek.de/scanexpress/usb/1200cu/winxp/webxp.exe
http://driver.mustek.de/scanexpress/usb/1200cu/winxp/webxp.w02
http://driver.mustek.de/scanexpress/usb/1200cu/winxp/webxp.w03
http://driver.mustek.de/scanexpress/usb/1200cu/winxp/webxp.w04

Even if it works under XP..(i am using Vista) I'd like to know how to extract it.

Please help me..

Greets

AutoFLAC Downloads are Available Again

Somebody just pointed out to me that the download links for AutoFLAC were not working. This occurred during one of the server migrations I've been working on over the past few weeks, so I'd say it's probably been unavailable for about 2 weeks. I do apologize for this oversight - the autoflac binaries are (currently) served from a separate server than the rest of the files on this site, and I simply overlooked this when migrating servers.

For now, this has been corrected by copying the files back to the appropriate location. In the near future, I'm going to setup a new download system so that all files are tracked and served from the same location, which will prevent this issue from reoccurring, as well as giving me some more flexibility and control over the downloads. Stay tuned.

Oh, and speaking of AutoFLAC, I should mention that development is still ongoing (same with Universal Extractor), just at a much slower pace than in the past. There are numerous reasons for this, which I won't get into here, but I did want to let all of you know that updated/enhanced versions are still coming at some point.