I'm fond our our privacy policy and it has served us quite well.
I've been an owner since late 2016--a mutual friend let me know Luke was interested in selling and I had been a customer for many years at that point. I liked the service and wanted it to continue. Still do.
Today's announcement is my purchasing the remainder of the company. The Acceptable Use Policy, Privacy Policy, and related documents will not be substantively changing.
The comment about diverging ideas and priorities relates to feature development and the product roadmap. Over the years we've received customer requests, suggestions, and feedback that on the one hand have a clear central tendency, but on the other requires difficult choices about where to focus and when. It's a situation better suited to the now simpler ownership structure.
I hope you will continue to recommend Prgmr where you find it appropriate to do so. Details about new features will need to wait for a formal announcement--but I'm happy to answer questions or concerns given that constraint.
Fantastic, thank you for the response (I also found out where Luke was headed and it seems like a much more positive development overall)! Looking forward to the announcement with additional detail.
While that copy is old, and our pricing reflects the hardware we run on today, the quip has now been updated to: "You get $5/month of support," which is the price of the smallest package we offer.
That wisecrack aside, the reality of the support we provide is more in-line with our byline: "We do not assume you are stupid." In practice, and with a hat tip to pera replying to you here, that means we provide what you might call peer support--we explain what's going on, what steps are necessary to correct it, and take responsibility when we caused the issue. And expect similar candor.
As you might expect, most of the technical support we provide is routine--with sufficient information communicated to both parties the problem is typically straightforward to resolve. But we treat tickets on their merit and customer reports do come in that admit more substantive investigation and resolution:
You might be interested in Andrew Stone's CocoaCon mailing list, whose members have regular in-person gatherings to get help, show off projects, or talk shop.
lobste.rs sysadmin here. Would you be willing to email me a screenshot or the error message you get accessing lobste.rs and having it blocked by Blue Coat?
We do customer support over IRC, on Freenode and OFTC. Particularly with the availability of web clients on Freenode, casual IRC users can reach us with minimal hassle while long-time users idle and voice when they're highlighted or the discussion interests them.
My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the patch developed from the experience.
I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of operating.
I visited Weirdstuff earlier this year looking for parts to mount a vertical PDU. I found spare 45U l-brackets and a u-bracket I'm pretty sure was designed for the problem I was solving--I'll miss digging through part bins and wandering down the aisles.
We use Yubikey for our production systems and yes: every operator has two keys that have been configured and registered in our access database.
We decided though not to make our backup keys hot. It's a manual operation to enable it. The risk that everyone could simultaneously lose their key was lower than the risk of a backup key being lost and then used--since a person isn't likely to routinely check on their backup keys the later problem may go undetected for some time, whereas you know the day you lose your primary key and must report that situation anyway.
Correct. It's the ability to share documents and conversation snippets provided by vendors, as well as curating and summarizing the significant amount of information available.
I've never seen an exploit that involves microcode updates, compiler fixes, kernel patches, and KVM/Xen updates all together. The number of moving parts is staggering.
Being able to filter and summarize that across company boundaries has helped me both understand and more effectively work to mitigate this problem.
Prgmr.com has been participating on the Slack channel this article mentions. Being able to share notes gleaned from reaching out to vendors and sort through the information and mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown has been a huge help.
I work for a cloud computing company that would have benefitted (and hopefully contributed) from being on that Slack. If you have the time, would you mind reaching out to me with details? My email is in my profile.
actually this kind of channel existed before (with OVH at first for the last few months, to fight some big abusers/phishings together)
I guess it will depends on everyone's good will, but most of us will probably stay connected, it does not cost much to keep a slack tab opened (well a few Gb of memory haha, thanks Slack) ;)
You can manage your VPS over SSH using our management console.[1] Since most of our users access their VPS using SSH, it's nice to use the same protocol for powering a machine off and on or accessing the serial console.
By and large our customers know what they're doing. That lets us provide IRC and email-based support that has been described more as working with a colleague than interacting with a vendor. This can be helpful when, for example, a user self-hosting email receives a complaint or has a delivery issue.
Most of the time though we just get out of the way and let you work on your VPS.
I'm sorry to read this. I've watched the single board computer space slowly lose ethernet; the connector is too large. I'd love a board with two built-in ethernet connectors so I could route traffic. With Soekris exiting the market, what options are now available?
Possiby not what you want to hear, but personally I have always bought (usually for peanuts) used (fanless) "thin clients" and added a PCI NIC, they make very good routers on the cheap, and since (originally) the machines were sold for lots of money to the enterprise market, they are generally very good quality/well built, sturdy, suffer not from overheating, etc.
If you want to buy "new" there are several suitable mini-itx boards available.
I migrated about a year ago from using net4801s to Ubiquity EdgeRouter Lite devices. The EdgeRouter Lite has 3 Gigabit ethernet ports. I got to keep my network topology and the software was flexible enough to mostly configure it how I wanted. I had been using a "from scratch" custom built Linux on the net4801s, but it was becoming more and more painful to keep up to date.
I've been an owner since late 2016--a mutual friend let me know Luke was interested in selling and I had been a customer for many years at that point. I liked the service and wanted it to continue. Still do.
Today's announcement is my purchasing the remainder of the company. The Acceptable Use Policy, Privacy Policy, and related documents will not be substantively changing.
The comment about diverging ideas and priorities relates to feature development and the product roadmap. Over the years we've received customer requests, suggestions, and feedback that on the one hand have a clear central tendency, but on the other requires difficult choices about where to focus and when. It's a situation better suited to the now simpler ownership structure.
I hope you will continue to recommend Prgmr where you find it appropriate to do so. Details about new features will need to wait for a formal announcement--but I'm happy to answer questions or concerns given that constraint.