My post was too long so I am breaking it down.

Part 1

So...

This is where I got my start in tech. I worked there and and supported and racked many of said bread rack servers. I guess I could be wrong and they could be speaking of another company but there was only one company I ever knew to do this at it was rackshack, before it became ev1servers, and then later theplanet and now softlayer.

There were a few others in Houston at the time trying to get this working too, namely redhost (I think, or was it alphared or something like that. ) which I had the chance to visit once. This place was much worse they cooled the iles the customers would walk down meanwhile the servers got no AC. They also shimmied servers into parking lot storage rooms. But that is not likely the place the article was about.

While what described in the article sounded horrible it was not all that bad. But then again this was also the early 2000s. While each rack did not have a dedicated firewall they did provide some niceties globally to all servers such as basic dos attack prevention and some interesting but easily avoidable hosting panel exploit prevention.

It really was the wild wild west of hosting. You had the tech support named webtech who was normally off site and basically was a job for anybody who could spell linux. They did in house training to support the most common linux related issues. When I was there there was a guy named Bill Badoux. This guy ran training and had a fairly comprehensive training class for all incoming techs, but none of that really mattered, most of the real work always filtered down to a handful of knowledgeable people. What was important was somebody answered the phone and was there to listen to the customer -- mostly complaining. On the other end of things we had DC techs. They were mostly about rebooting servers as none of the whitebox servers on bread racks supported any sort of remote reboot. At the time you would phone in your reboot, or submit a ticket in this POS software called "pipeline" which was a total shitstorm in house ticketing system, that would more likely get you fired for it doing something different than you thought it might do than actually help you do anything. But us techs made the best of it and often resorted to IRC to actually get the real work done. The NOC was a separate entity -- I think their paychecks even came from a different org. They mostly sat around and watched graphs -- and again would call somebody who knew what to do when "the graphs looked bad". I know one guy nicked named Brain at the time who was one of the knowledgeable guys. He ended up writing some software to be able to display the graphs in real time. This really helped the techs spot things much faster.

I was there about ~4 years. Man there were stories.

One time I saw a DC tech drop a handful of hard drives on the way to a server to replace drives that had just failed. He picked the dropped hard drive up off the floor, dusted it off and proceeded to replace a failed dive with the drive he just dropped. By chance the server booted up and entered a FSCK -- we might be okay! -- but atlas the tech just powered the server off and powered it back one and it never saw the light of day again. Back then and probably still interrupting a FSCK was most defiantly doom to the FS.

Slightly NFSW but a true story. Rackshack hosted 2 things - Porn, and Jesus sites. Neither were all that nice to work with. The Jesus guys would always find out or suspect their server, hard drive, or IP was used to host porn in a previous life and demand we change one or all of the things they suspected had porn on it. This more than often resulted in your request causing your server to be shut down for a few hours and then turned back on and a note updating the ticket from DC stating the hard drive or whatever that had previously had contact with porn was swapped out. In reality the server just sat powered off for a few hours. Request for IP changes did happen and were actually carried out if they could, but again this is was the early days so that often required the customer to migrate their site to a new server in the data center. But back to the porn. One time I got a call from a guy wanting to know if his site was up. He ask me to navigate to a obvious porn site -- sure enough on our network with the less than 1 ms ping time. He proceeded to give me login information and navigate me to a specific video and asked me to click on it. It played instantly. After a few seconds I reported back to the customer and he asked a few question about the speed of the site. Then he proceeded to tell me the video was of him and his wife.... Now at that point I kept good notes in the POS ticketing system named pipeline. Those notes included the login credentials to the site for future testing -- I was a noob for sure. The next day I walk in to work and it was clear everybody had found the login credentials to the site and that was the first time I caused a policy change of do not record such things as the techs will abuse it for their personal pleasure.