Hello Everyone,

This is to inform you all of what has happened in the past 6 days at frantech.

A little back story to help explain things better - For the past year or so Frantech has shared rack space with a company (who will remain nameless for now) at steadfast networks. While we've had our disputes (mostly on how to setup something, nothing ever serious), things had been ok for the past while. In the past month, though, relations started to head south and Frantech was in the midst of moving all operations to gigenet, another Chicago based datacenter.

What actually went on

On Thursday of last week all of our hardware went offline. At first we thought it was either a switch problem, a network burp or, long shot, an abuse claim and a wide nullroute (unlikely but we've had datacenters null entire C's on us before). What really happened, though, was our racking partner literally went to the datacenter and removed our harddrives from our Windows Nodes and MySQL Node and took them back to his place in Michigan.

The fellow then calls me, claiming Frantech ran up a $12,000 invoice (we haden't, our dues were only around $1000), and that if we didn't pay our drives would be formatted. After long discussions Frantech was able to bring down the randsom/extorsion price to "only" $6000, at which point we paid the sum and had our drives picked up and taken to Chicago by a staff member.

What has happened to try to get things back online

Once the drives arrived back in Chicago the driver as well as another staff member of ours went into Chicago and started trying to assemble our RAID's. Now, normally this should just be a plug-n-play (someone may as well put that saying to use), but the fellow in question never put a label on which drive belonged to each set, and the labels we had in place when we originally ordered the servers were no longer on the hotswap trays.

10 hours into this, we finally have 1 server back online, restoring over 50% of our windows server base (remember, linux was 100% fine in this, the fellow didn't take the drives from this node). Late yesterday, though, one of the drives in that server has now decided to die due to damage the fellow in question has inflicted.

How do we know it simply wasen't a bad drive? of our 8 drives in our servers that were taken (10 in total, MYSQL is just fine), 3 of them suddenly get the exact same issues.

So where is my windows data?

At this point, we're all dreading to say that we think the data is gone. To date i've spent the past 3 days now working over 20 hours each shift trying to get the arrays and the nodes to get back online to no avail. We've had our in Chicago tech go in yesterday and spend over 8 hours of his own time assisting us to try to get things resolved. On top of this our datacenter has spent about 10 hours as well trying to assist us in getting this to work.

What are my options?

We've proposed two options to everyone on our IRC channel, but we want more input.

1) Wipe the drives, take the black eye and get everyone a VPS back online in a clean VPS (we'll throw in free upgrades as well as credits to those that request them).

2) I keep trying to recover the data, no ETA on if or when this could happen. I can only put so much more energy into this, I have very little as it stands.

I'd like people to please send in either a reply to this email with their choice, or a ticket letting me know. Out of all opinions given, i'll take the one with the majority of votes and go with it.

Both options will include a new offsite backup system inside a different chicago datacenter giving us (to start) 2TB of storage space. While we had backups of user data it was, guess what, on the drives we lost.

Lets say i take option 1, how long until we have our vps's back?

I can restore/recreate all vps's within a few hours of the decision being made.



There isn't any way to explain how miserable the entire Frantech staff has been and the sorrow we've all been suffering because this actually happened.

All we can hope is that after this all we will be able to regain client trust in this all and continue todo business with each everyone.



Thank you,



~Francisco Dias

Frantech Owner

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