Halloween in Hallmarkistan

While people from New York to San Francisco and especially in Cleveland in between, I suppose :-), are busy preparing Halloween and sending those cards (see previous post), people in the southeast of the United States have been suffering and still do. Wilma has been such a shrew. Couldn't be tamed. I was beaten too. This group of websites happens to be on a server located in Boca Raton, Florida, at one of my provider's premier data centers. Due to the weather conditions, on Monday October 24th, the day when the eye of hurricane Wilma was exactly over that area of south Florida which experienced significant damage, the data center lost municipal power at approximately 8:40am ET. An hour later both primary and backup power were lost. The servers had to be shut down to prevent damage and data loss, as the diesel generators did not work anymore and air conditioning could not be maintained. That was the moment when I noticed here in Hamburg, Germany, that something was terribly wrong. But I could not intervene, as there was no contact whatsoever to the server or the provider (no phone, email, http, ftp, traceroute, ping, you name it). A full battery of tests had been conducted on the generators and systems on October 19th in preparation to Hurricane Wilma. But then, when really needed, the generators did not work for more than an hour, when the provider switched to battery backups till those were soon depleted. I spare you all the many further details that would fill many pages, about the generator vendor's technicians flown in and the difficulties to effectively access the backup generators due to extremely difficult weather conditions etc. I am sorry that those who wanted to visit my sites could not do so. Some mail bounced, some was maybe lost while I was several times switching the MX record in the domain name server for the mailboxes at butterbach.net from Florida to Germany and back. If anyone could not reach me by mail, please try again. The big problem is over, though some smaller details still need to be addressed and settled. The essential works again after at least 36 hours total blackout (I have to wait for the final report of my monitoring service at the end of the month)! Whew!

On Monday, in the midst of the emergency, I had sent around an email notice [Subject: BUTTERBACH.NET affected by WILMA] to as many on my email list as I could. This brought me some heartwarming nice reactions, not too many though, plus a few less pleasant ones. Among the latter I want to quote one coming from Muffinstan instead (as opposed to bagels in Hallmarkistan), from a former member of the board (and now of its Council) of the London School of Economics' Hayek Society. How (classical) liberal or libertarian can you get!

Subject: STOP Spamming CUNT. Hope you drown in Florida
Body: I don't give a shit about you so stop sending me the shit below:

My server in Florida [...]

My answer was:

You are such a gentleman, Mr. ...... ..........

Let's be one and not reveal the name of sir antispam.