OVH arp issues/etc.

S

sorressean

Hello all,

I've had a rather rocky experience with OVH from the time I started with my SoYouStart server. I stick with this because the server is cheap, but support is lacking. The first time I enabled my firewall, I just set up a block-everything policy, only allowing connections to the ports that I thought should connect. About an hour or so later while I was working, my server was rebooted 2-3 times while I was working. I finally called the support number and was told by a tech (who sounded stoned or half asleep) that monitoring was enabled and they couldn't ping me. Fine, can we stop rebooting the server and I'll disable monitoring? No, apparently that wasn't possible, so I had to wait for a reboot 5-6 more times as well as tons of emails alerting me that a rescue system was being booted a few different times. Eventually it was determined that this was a software issue and they couldn't do anything, so they stopped rebooting and monitoring finally was acknowledged. I had turned it off, but they were in the process of "troubleshooting."

A while after this, I decided to inquire about monitoring; I thought that even if it was delayed, some sort of monitoring would be nice. So I sent a couple of support tickets (and received no response). Eventually I called to follow up and tried to send a support ticket from a different address (and different server), to which I received no response. Finally I was told that my mails were bouncing. Checking my logs, I found that emails were being sent out and the HELO being used was web-otrs@localdomain. I have Postfix configured to require a valid FQDN and obviously that doesn't fit the bill, so the mail was just dropped. After arguing over the phone, the ticket was escalated (but I had to call back 2-3 more times to actually get someone to look at it). It looks like someone didn't fill out the configuration file, because the mail-headers had defaults that were clearly supposed to be changed. Eventually I forgot why I even got in touch with them and just let the firewall thing drop.

I needed to get in touch with them for one other item. After emailing them, I was forced to reply to the email to ensure that it really was me emailing for security. I'm not really sure what problem this solves, as there are two scenarios:
  1. I'm not me and spoofing an email, in which case the owner of my address gets information they already knew, and can follow up about it or discard it since there was no harm done.
  2. I am me and I get the information I requested.
Regardless, I followed up and eventually had to call because the question could not be answered over the phone. I was inquiring as to whether or not I could upgrade the bandwidth on my server. In order to get this question answered, I had to verify my name (first and last), phone number, email address, IP address, physical address, then had to log into the panel to ensure that it really was me. this was all to inform me that none of the SoYouStart servers could actually be upgraded.

With all of this said, I have a couple of questions. First, I would really like to encourage anyone looking to go through this company to think twice. If you have the money for a better company, it's probably better spent elsewhere.

  1. Are there comparable servers at a decent price point? I really like ARP Networks, but $180 for essentially what I have now compared to $60 is quite a lot of money per month. I don't mind a bit more, but I'm trying to keep the price low.
  2. I'm seeing a lot of this in logs:
    Code: 
    Jul 26 23:37:17 sapphire kernel: arp: 192.99.32.254 moved from 00:07:b4:00:01:01 to 00:07:b4:00:01:02 on em0
Jul 26 23:55:00 sapphire kernel: arp: 192.99.32.251 moved from 00:07:b4:00:01:02 to 00:25:90:7b:a3:a4 on em0
Jul 26 23:55:00 sapphire kernel: arp: 192.99.32.251 moved from 00:25:90:7b:a3:a4 to 00:07:b4:00:01:02 on em0
Jul 26 23:55:00 sapphire kernel: arp: 192.99.32.251 moved from 00:07:b4:00:01:02 to 00:07:b4:00:01:01 on em0
    As stated above, support tickets are futile and there's no telling if I'll even get an answer. Has anyone had experience with OVH and know what this is for? This is cluttering my messages and I don't think it should be occurring.

Thanks,
 
Re: OVH arp issues/etc

sorressean said:
2) I'm seeing a lot of this in logs:
Code: 
Jul 26 23:37:17 sapphire kernel: arp: 192.99.32.254 moved from 00:07:b4:00:01:01 to 00:07:b4:00:01:02 on em0
Jul 26 23:55:00 sapphire kernel: arp: 192.99.32.251 moved from 00:07:b4:00:01:02 to 00:25:90:7b:a3:a4 on em0
Jul 26 23:55:00 sapphire kernel: arp: 192.99.32.251 moved from 00:25:90:7b:a3:a4 to 00:07:b4:00:01:02 on em0
Jul 26 23:55:00 sapphire kernel: arp: 192.99.32.251 moved from 00:07:b4:00:01:02 to 00:07:b4:00:01:01 on em0
Click to expand...

CARP, VRRP, HSRP, or something similar is likely the cause if it is a somewhat regular occurrence. Those addresses are most likely logical addresses shared between two physical hosts and are flip-flopping back and forth.
 
Just wanted to note on this old thread that I finally ended up switching. A lot of my emails were bounced after a while because I was blacklisted (OVH doesn't care if VPS and soyoustart send spam out, so they just don't bother doing anything). This resulted in them getting blacklisted eventually. I have reported a few abuse tickets, one tech told me that they don't do anything because you can purchase VPS instances so fast and they can't deal with it, so I guess the people just get to keep 1 VPS and spam goes to /dev/null.

TL/DR: this company is awful. I switched to arpnetworks and am so much happier. It's a bit more money, but it's a pleasure talking to someone who knows what they're doing. I don't need to reply to a reply of a reply that verifies I can reply to emails to get help and the server doesn't just get rebooted for no good reason.
 
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