Sat May 17 03:20:24 EDT 2003

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! SORRY, WAIT, I MEAN... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Well, now. In an unrelated but completely hilarious move, HarvardNet's parent company, Allegiance Telecom, has declared bankruptcy. "This is not your father's bankruptcy" seems to be the theme of this little fiscal flush, with a promise that the company will pull some sort of Covad-like miracle and come back out of it. Well, what do we know. But that 1.2 BILLION dollar debt seems pretty darn tasty. How much of that went into Mark Washburn's pockets? We'll never know. We attended a dinner where some voice rose over the din and said that Mark got enough to never have to work again, but they might have been drunk at the time. Apparently, as a result of the unplanned net vacation the Charlestown Facility took this past week, BOSTON.COM has decided to finally slam-dunk Allegiance and hosting.com, and move over to InterNap. Guess it's time to remove that Customer Case Study, huh, fellas? Case Closed. We're enjoying the resurgence of interest in the page, and promise to get around to finally turning the page into the museum and library of information on the HarvardNet story we always hoped this would be. Obviously, however, it's not a major priority, as it shouldn't be for you. Let go, let go of your anger.

Sat May 17 02:06:02 EDT 2003

WHILE WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION

This isn't entirely worth mentioning, but what the heck, it's late. We were told a few months back that one of the members of our crack staff came up in a conversation with an ex-harvardnet employee.... and that employee said, basically, "Never hire him... he's incompetent and trouble." Dude, the job market is hard enough as it is.... why punish someone for telling the truth? Oh, that's right... your job was to lie until they laid you off. You're making us want to tell the Salesman Matrix story. And nobody wants that.

Wed May 14 16:53:19 EDT 2003

YOU HAVE TO CUT THE CORD SOMETIME

Imagine our surprise on two fronts. First, we find all the bandwidth and services we've been stealing from the old HarvardNet facility stop working, and then a metric ton of hits come to our humble little site of truth and justice. The first quickly became clear. Basically, the HarvardNet Facility in Charlestown (currently known as the "Allegiance Telecom Mark Washburn Memorial Rape-Em-And-Leave-Em-In-The-Ditch Hosting Carnival") has redundant OC-3's going out of the building. Hurrah! Redundancy! However, those OC-3's quickly funnel together into one OC-48. Boo! No redundancy! This sort of hedging would have been fine except the true terrorist of the Internet, the Backhoe, decided to give HarvardNet's OC-48 a little rough love in the morning, severing it nicely. This made everything go down quicker than Madonna at an after-party, and basically pulled everyone in Charlestown off the air for several hours. But that's not all! It also killed the nameserver, newsserver, mailservers... you know, that crap that's supposed to never go off the air. No doubt some people had to write an awful lot of letters, or, more likely, just laid low until the whole mess blew over. Among those hit were Boston.com, who has published a story explaining the situation. Of course, the irony was that this story shows why Boston.com was down. Extra bonus points for the story being written by Hiawatha Bray, who is, basically, a jerk. Enjoy how he tries to explain the concept of Domain Name Service (DNS) at the bottom. Basically, they claim they could have survived the cable cut had they had a mere TWO WEEKS MORE to work on the project. Whatever. The second part of this little story, the fact that people still know to check our site for the news of HarvardNet's corpse fucking up yet again, really and truly warms our hearts. Once we recover from the paint fume huffing we've been doing to pass the time, we're going to re-do this site to be a nice little information kiosk on how everything went so terribly, terribly wrong. For the record, it was members of harvardnetsucked.com who helped set up the DNS servers, and we're still proud of our work. We're actually especially proud that the secret nobody-should-know-about-it DNS server that does all the work, is STILL named "FREECHIP". Chip Ach's Memory lives!

Wed Jul 17 02:03:34 EDT 2002

DER ANDREAS RETURNS

We recieved shocked and amazed notification from Agent Haywood that the Andreas K. has returned to employment with Hosting.Com on a 30 day contract. Perhaps it's time we should make our opinion on Andreas known. Andreas had energy. Andreas was in on time, left on time, and ran his group like an iron fist. No amount of angry messages on the fuckedcompany.com site could take that away from him. However, Andreas wanted to run his own little HarvardNet in his department, duplicating other positions within the company that did the same thing as his new groups did. If he didn't run it, he didn't trust it. And if he didn't trust it, he'd ignore it, except to trash it in favor of his group. Andreas made no friends outside of his own group, and his own group was fucking terrified of him. So, when the chips came down, out went Andreas. He rivalled Marky-Mark for the pure gallons of angry vitrol posted on the fuckedcompany message base. That takes some work. Somehow the charges against him for his attitude towards others in the company morphed into some sort of buttfucking theme, but boys will be boys, and very few people escaped scathed on the message base. For the record, Andreas at no point attempted to mount us or any of our peers, so we can assume that this rumor was typical angry viciousness. Companies NEED people like Andreas: A bunch of mush-mouthed, lost pandas aren't going to drive a company to success. Without some wolverines in the mix, no one's going to see a paycheck for very long. But these companies also need someone strong to keep people like Andreas in check, or the wolverines will overrun the entire structure of the area they're in, crushing anything in their path, filling the halls with hate. Andreas didn't have someone to keep him in check, so Andreas started driving people out, good people got hurt, and so on. This is obviously Andreas' nature; scorpions are scorpions. Too bad the company didn't know how to use his nature in a constructive fashion. Let's see how they do this time. Again, we stress: NO BUTTFUCKING OCCURRED.

Wed Jul 17 01:54:12 EDT 2002

A HAPPY MEMORY

From: Agent C02138 To: youfuckedup@harvardnetsucked.com Subject: I loved HarvardNet Hey, It's been two years since I started working at HarvardNet. I got in just before the hiring freeze and it was a short six months that I was on board. Had I known about this website before signing on, I might have thought twice, but I'm glad I didn't. I wouldn't trade my time at HarvardNet for anything in the world. Yeah, the administration and CEO, well, for lack of a better word, sucked, but everyone in the provisioning department with me rocked. I never enjoyed working for a company so much and I don't know that I ever will have such hope, albeit eventually dashed, for the future of something that I felt I contributed to the success (er, demise) of. I miss everyone I worked with there and have left telecom/dotcom/DSL for good. I'm on to customer service - just got a new job after leaving from the safety net I fell in after the HarvardNet first wave of layoffs. I've got a HarvardNet polo shirt, fleece vest, and my name plate. When I see them, I think of what was and what could have been. I miss the foosball table and everyone who was around it at lunch. I've lost a good portion of my touch since the doors closed. Whenever I drink a beer before noon, I think of you guys in the parking lot at 11:00 with the trunk open and the Budwisers. I'll never forget everyone there. -AC

Fri Jun 28 23:47:35 EDT 2002

FURIOUS GEORGE

For all his flaws, we always liked George Kerns. He had that battle-tested way about him, that said he knew what he was there for, what he had to do, and what he was about. Maybe we thought his actions were cruel and his business sense a little warped, but at least you saw George was in the organization, and what happened next wasn't a surprise. So when it was announced that George Kerns took over Digex, we weren't surprised he could be running out of HarvardNet's Flaming Wreck into a new high-paid position; after all, Digex needed someone like George and that's just what they got. What did surprise us, however, was how quickly it took Kerns to settle himself into the ass-crack of the CEO's chair and begin the happy process of harvesting the souls of the innocent. Usually you try to get in a month of nervous tension in the office before you start whacking the crew! But, well, maybe George figured it out: it doesn't matter when you do it, it's how much you can slice things down before the cuts don't heal. Striking that balance is the mark of a truly hated CEO. Give us a call when you're out on your butt again, George! You never write. Hey, summer's upon us, and HarvardNetSucked.Com is currently preparing a major re-vamp to turn this into a permanent shrine. Please send in stories or other comments, so we can put this behind us. We promise to have the site done as soon as possible, after we finish reading a book or two.

Tue Apr 30 01:12:23 EDT 2002

YOU DON'T SAY!

"There is a buzz going around that both Chicago and Austin facilities are cutting what staff is left and selling off assets. The date is around May 6th for the Austin hosting.com facility."

Sat Apr 20 17:50:41 EDT 2002

OUR NEW LOGO

If there's a call for it, we'll make a desktop wallpaper of the image. Our title for it is "THE DREAM DENIED".

Tue Apr 16 18:19:04 EDT 2002

HURRAH, A LITTLE PARTY

We didn't ask permission before posting this, and we're not organizing it; it just showed up in our mailbox: A handful of former HN folk were planning on heading out to GoodTimes in Somerville this coming Friday for a little reunion, and I'd like to extend the invitation to everyone here in the hopes that you join us. I'm not sure exactly who'all is on this list, but we'd love to see every one of you there at the bar at 8pm. Let me know if you can make it!

Tue Mar 19 02:14:17 EST 2002

A LITTLE NAME CHANGE AND A LITTLE DOWNTIME

The word is that HOSTING.COM is going to rename itself to "Allegiance Telecom Internet". What EVER! Too bad layoffs are accompanying that boring news. In other news, this was found nailed to our office door this morning: Charlestown Datacenter Latency Experienced 3/15/02 On Friday, 3/15/02, at approximately 2:30 PM customers experienced latency to and from the Hosting.com Charlestown Datacenter. This document outlines the events that led up to this latency and what has been done to resolve the issue. As part of our upgrade to the "Next Generation" Network, IBI was installing a Cisco application called Netflow which gathers statistics on usage to one of their switches. The card in the switch did not have enough memory to support Netflow, causing intermittent problems due to high processor load. The problem was identified and remedied by removing Netflow. This change was done by an engineer at IBI not familiar with our Change Management process thus no notification was given to Hosting.com. What is being done to correct this in the future? Proper change management procedures have been implemented at IBI and the department responsible for those changes is now trained in Change Management procedures and notifications. We expect that no further changes on the Allegiance backbone will be made without going through proper channels. Translation: We're desperately trying to track bandwidth for billing and we slapped on a major change to the network in the middle of the business day, probably because it's a major downer to stick around the Charlestown Facility after hours and it's a bitch to get out of there on Route 99 after 4pm on a Friday. Of course, the blow-off attitude of whoever's left is a reflection of management not giving a crap either, but we'll fire the poor kid anyway.

Wed Feb 27 17:17:12 EST 2002

MARK PERFECTS THE "WASHBURN WHOPPER"

An old friend mailed us with an interesting URL today, one which made us both angry and delighted. Angry because it was Mark Washburn telling a big fat lie. Delighted because it proves us right, once again, of what sort of individual he is. The URL is that of an Article that appeared in the August 2001 issue of Hostopia Magazine. "AUGUST?" you might say. Well, we usually reserve our toilet time to issues of Maxim and Mother Jones, not dreary publications featuring rod-sucking of hosting executives. But we digress. The Article, "Land of the Lost", discusses the power and overbearing influence of the Telcos in hosting and other services, and their plans for world domination. The issue we have is with this DIRECT QUOTE of Marky Mark in the article: "It's a wonderful natural progression," says Mark Washburn, senior VP of web hosting at Allegiance Telecom. "As the owner of a small business myself until recently, my goal was to consolidate vendors. We provide the opportunity for customers to do that, and we get an instant [marketing] end that our competitors don't have." The small business Washburn mentions was HarvardNet, a Massachusetts-based hosting shop focused on SMEs that Allegiance acquired in April. Allegiance also bought up Adgrafix, another New England enterprise, and spun the two along with its existing offerings into its new brand: Hosting.com. What's that? MARK WAS THE OWNER OF HARVARDNET? We'll bet THAT will come as a surprise to many people. Be sure to let us know your feelings about your old owner.

Fri Feb 1 12:31:45 EST 2002

THE JACKALS COME TO FEED

Some people wonder why we continue this site, long after HarvardNet is but a dull throbbing in the minds of employees looking for decent wages or working in some grey drone of a job. Why not just... let it go? Move on? Well, the same reason we've been doing it all along; all the hard stuff is done (website hosting isn't exactly rocket science anymore) and you just get to type and have some fun at the same time. It's a warm feeling, really. Like we wet our pants. But we also know that the TRUE story of HarvardNet isn't quite finished. There's still sort of a company around, and they've got a few bucks, and since they completely screwed over thousands with their not-enough-warning shutoff of DSL, there's a good potential for a lawsuit. Oh, did we say "potential"? There IS a lawsuit brewing, and the lawyer in charge of it knew just where to go to reach the many fine screwed customers of harvardnet... HARVARDNETSUCKED.COM!

I am an atty suing HarvardNET on behalf of its DSL subscribers for breaching their contract by terminating DSL service. Our case is Bay Colony Group v. HarvardNET, Civil Action No. 00-5906, in Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge, MA. We also believe that HNET acted unfairly or deceptively because it must have known that it was going to cancel its DSL long before it actually disclosed that material fact to its subscribers. Can you put me in touch with anyone ASAP who can testify from personal knowledge that HNET intended to cancel its DSL service before it sent the letter disclosing that? Like Dr. Evil, "I need the info." Thanks, John Peter Zavez jzavez@akzlaw.com Adkins, Kelston & Zavez, P.C. 90 Canal Street, Suite 500 617-367-1040

So there you have it, those of you who had DSL and suddenly... didn't. Come help feed on HarvardNet's carcass (hereby renamed the Mark Washburn Memorial Pile of Protein) and get what's coming to you. As an added bonus, the same Lawyer who was suing us for HarvardNet is in THIS lawsuit! So be sure to get involved and see Daniel Halston in action, if only to get a look at that hair! Oh, God! The hair! The memories!

Fri Feb 1 12:46:06 EST 2002

HEY, WHERE THE HELL IS MARK?

His Washburn left the employ of Allegiance Telecom some time ago. No doubt he's back on his feet fleecing some other unsuspecting group of nads. Maybe someone could let us know about his whereabouts? We wouldn't want to lose complete track of our star CEO! UPDATE: Codename "Sultry" writes in with this sighting: I saw Washburn at the Patriots/Rams game some time back in November. He's lost quite a bit of weight! Must be the lack of a fat paycheck, but then again he's probably still reaping profits off the fleecing of Level 3. When I asked him what he's been up to, he said he had to go. Not in the sharing mood I guess :) Still no idea where he's working, however.... keep the sightings coming.

Tue Jan 29 08:39:21 EST 2002

OUR CONSULTANTS WEIGH IN

The HarvardnetSucks.Com Consultants wrote in from their current contracting assignment (shredding all evidence of financial hyjinx regarding Hnet/Allegiance/Fidelity) to give us their technical opinion of the Charlestown downtime.

I hope all is well... What I noticed was a major problem is that both auth01.ns and auth02.ns are hanging off the SAME FRIGGIN' ROUTER. Ahem. Not that someone in the past hadn't purposefully moved the IP addresses of auth01.ns and auth02.ns to different subnets so they could and should be on DIFFERENT networks... While there were customers who were pingable (boston.com, for example), it was impossible to resolve the IP addresses. The correct HarvardNetish reaction will be, of course, to place nameservers in several hundred Central Offices with no customers anywhere near them. traceroute to auth01.ns.harvard.net (140.239.140.239), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 8 POS7-0.core2.bos2.hosting.com (66.2.95.110) 24.352 ms 24.362 ms 24.988 ms 9 140.239.225.133 (140.239.225.133) 25.004 ms 24.593 ms 24.293 ms 10 64.55.36.134 (64.55.36.134) 25.158 ms 24.919 ms 24.864 ms 11 auth01.ns.harvard.net (140.239.140.239) 24.490 ms * 24.910 ms traceroute to auth02.ns.harvard.net (209.21.182.4), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 8 POS7-0.core2.bos2.hosting.com (66.2.95.110) 24.493 ms 24.193 ms 24.330 ms 9 140.239.225.133 (140.239.225.133) 24.671 ms 24.873 ms 24.550 ms 10 64.55.36.134 (64.55.36.134) 25.890 ms 25.241 ms 24.505 ms 11 auth02.ns.harvard.net (209.21.182.4) 25.345 ms * 26.101 ms

During our tiny tenure at The Painted Lady, we found the networking department generally had it together, with some real smart folks burning the midnight oil to work magic out of the pittances given them. Every time you saw a lack of redundancy, it was a decision from the suits to save money. Which is it? Still the suits? Or have they replaced the network staff with a Whack-a-Mole game?

Tue Jan 22 15:57:00 EST 2002

DOWN FOR THE COUNT

We got letters, calls, and a visit from old HarvardNet customers and ex-employees letting us know that the Charlestown facility went completely face-down today, turning off all their customers and shutting them entirely off the net for several hours. How do you do that? Beats us; maybe some pasty-faced sweatball over in the facilities/networking department at Allegiance Telecom wants to burble out some lame excuse that we can print on here. No doubt whatever assurances they make that this was a complete anomaly and will never happen again will fall on understanding ears. If whatever is left over there wants to produce some easy excuses to the customers without having to give them the real reason they went down (our personal bet is someone had sex on the main router on a drunken dare) then just use this random excuse generator to handle those last angry calls from quickly-fleeing customers. "Maybe they went back to doing milk." - Inside Joke from our friend Tony UPDATE: A kind soul sent in the official company burbling to customers that was sent out after the outage. Ooo! A Cisco hardware failure! Naturally, the backup router should have taken over... what? No backup router, you say?

Mon Dec 17 13:29:41 EST 2001

WE BLEW OFF OUR OWN PARTY!

So the moral of the story is, if you expect to show up to your OWN HOLIDAY PARTY, don't begin drinking the night before. Everyone at the HarvardNetSucks Compound was so messed up on Friday that we missed the chance to show up to the Marriott. A real shame; we could have worn our HarvardNet boxers and really amused the crowd when we showed them off. Hey, speaking of getting a little too much alcohol, we did get the message that at least one hosting.com staff member made the classic error of trying to go back to work after throwing back a few at the party.... apparently the staff had to deal with a slightly drunk co-worker bossing them around, never a great way to start the holiday season. Next time, sleep it off in the old Oxygen cage! There's lots of room in there. (To really hammer home this quaint little "you know who we're talking about" theme of this message, we could probably find some way to slip in a further detail about the person in question, but we're lacking inGenuity right now from all the Mike's Hard Lemonade.) And why do they call it Mike's Hard Lemonade when it's so easy to drink? And speaking of THAT, it's too bad they can't call the Waltham office "Exodus" because that's apparently what's going on.... again.

Mon Dec 3 11:46:35 EST 2001

THE BUTLER DID IT!

Once, the Mighty HarvardNet lured big-name companies into their doors, with promises ladled like tasty soup into the mouths of technologically unsure start-ups. "Come spend time at our World Class Data Centers and see for yourself," our salesmen would promise. And to be sure, we really did our best to make it so. Good money spent on some good ideas, although it was a bit sad that the racks were entirely wrong for the room. Regardless, HarvardNet DID get some high-visibility folks to sign on the dotted line: companies like Oxygen Media, Ask Jeeves, Boston.Com and, well, Itulip... Oxygen was the biggest single customer in that room during 2000; they blew out of there a while ago. Now, it appears, Ask Jeeves has done the same, moving on to greener pastures. We doubt this reflects particularly badly on hosting.com (unless someone wants to mail us a different side to the story) but just shows that Ask Jeeves got tired of being jerked around by the previous company and finally decided to take matters into their own well-groomed hands. ASKJEEVES is now being hosted via UUNET in some capacity. (We did an ARIN lookup on the askjeeves.com address to determine this.)

Mon Nov 19 21:48:14 EST 2001

THE HARVARDNETSUCKED.COM CHRISTMAS PARTY!

HARVARDNETSUCKED.COM will be having our annual Christmas party, and as usual we'll be having a grand old time with the stories of stock options, promises of greatness, and assurances that there would be no layoffs as the company swelled to 10 times its previous size. Man, those were fun times! We'll be having our party at the Copley Marriott on December 14th, 7:30pm. We heard some rumors that some lame-ass startup called Hosting.Com was trying to take our space, but we kicked their asses out. By the way, we got special dispensation to allow people to bring pot and ecstacy to the room, so have at! Make a little history. No word yet on whether His Washburn will be showing up to recount his tales of Operation Bigfoot.

Thu Nov 15 16:37:39 EST 2001

REST WELL, GOOD SOLDIER

Since we've not been able to set foot on any HarvardNet or Allegiance property since this site began, we've had to rely on allies behind the lines to give us the dirt, the facts, and the view from where it counts: Inside the HarvardNet Bunker. None gave us more facts, factoids, rumors, and giggle gas than one special person, codename "Heywood", who would take our calls, give us the details, and not hold back. When things got hysterically stupid over there, they gave us the lowdown. When the firewall stopped working, Heywood tipped us off. And when the company turned around and spooned out the cholesterol clogging the arteries of the now-Allegiance-owned firm, it was Heywood sizzling the lines. An era has come to an end as Heywood was classically fucked by the firm after suffering through the last year and a half of garbage that rained down on him and all the other hapless employees. Out on the street, our top informant has moved to greener pastures, or at least more cable TV. Of course, Heywood couldn't just be removed without sneaking the fact over to us that we can expect "Pete the Hatchet" to be making a few more deep cuts in the next few weeks. That's the way to do it! Slow, bleeding layoffs always recharge the troops. We discharge you with full honors, soldier.

Wed Sep 5 12:22:25 EDT 2001

OUR MEMORABLE YEAR

He smiled and shook our hands. "You were my TV for six months....You're the reason I told our marketing department not to allow HarvardNet to list us as a customer." - Guy we met at a party It's been four months since we've updated this site, not for any sinister reasons, but for the same reasons people thought we should have given up some time in December: Lack of time, different priorities, a wedding.... The usual cotton candy of life that wraps around your hands and makes it harder to type. People just don't have the attention span to consider that we'd move on when we were good and ready, not because others were bored of hearing about this and that about HarvardNet. Expect this site to get a few more updates, with positive stories for a change. But for the moment, it's the usual negative posting. It shouldn't be a surprise to you to hear that our last legal twitching fell on deaf ears and we were denied repayment for the fees; that's $21,000 in the shitbox just to say that no, we weren't violating any agreements by listing a firewall hostname. Amazing how that all works, really. Well, at least the moral high ground is ours, and not others involved in the process... Speaking of leaving the Internet Supermarket with cash shoved down your pants, our old friend Mark Washburn has been going through an interesting summer as well. HarvardNet, after being sold to Allegiance Telecom in a somewhat questionable stock and cash deal, was renamed to hosting.com and made one of a family of data centers across the country. Most amusingly, the years-old (and pretty inaccurate) map of the Boston Data Center is still viewable on the hosting.com site. Apparently the people working on the site used what they had available, and not what was accurate. But here's the kicker: MARK IS GONE. Yep, out the door. It was painted as a "sabbatical" from the stresses of running the company. It was more likely a laundry trip from all the dirt stains he got running the company into the ground. But we're a little distanced from the whole process these days, what with nearly every spy we had in the company now on to greener pastures. It took a while for us to know that Mark had been ka-booted, and that's kind of sad; we should have been right there, hours after he left, to do some sort of dance or something on this site. But, you do what you can, right? So out he goes, with a rumored package deal to get him out of Allegiance's hair. That should go down well with all of you who were laid off in December, just in time for Christmas. Money for running HarvardNet (poorly), Money for selling HarvardNet (for running it poorly) and now money for leaving HarvardNet (after selling it and running it poorly). What we're most afraid of, in the current "economic downturn", is this: That people will look at the history of HarvardNet and think it was done in by the same forces that have caused many other companies to close: a sudden loss in the speculative market, the unique regulatory hurdles of the DSL field, the wet snap of a boom economy coming to its senses. These events have felled some amazing places, websites and companies that had brilliant ideas and were staffed with folks working full-out to make a difference. HarvardNet had some brilliant people (as well as a large amount of Oxygen Verification Specialists, the less said the better) and some great foundations, but it wasn't hard and fast outside forces that crushed it. The HarvardNet towards the end was similar only in name to the principles and ideas it had been founded by. The frauds perpetrated on its customers were late-in-the-game catching up imposed by people who were trying to suck the carcass dry for easy bonuses when it was obvious that the IPO get-rich-stick wasn't going to be hitting anyone's head anytime soon. There was incompetence, there was horror, there were things done that could curdle milk at 10 paces. And Mark knew. Oh, he knew. And he smiled. So where are we now, a year after this site went up? Well, we're happy. Matrimony and fresh air can do that for you; we still see the occasional HarvardNet friend, and wish we could see more. No doubt we'll jostle back and forth into old co-workers down the rapids of employment, and we'll smile as they look at us and the phrase "Mark Washburn's Fat Head" will float into their minds. It's a small legacy, but it's our legacy. And we're proud.

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