Subject:     Important information about Winternet
Sent:        7/19/96 4:18 PM
Received:    7/19/96 11:43 PM
From:        Steve Devore, steved@winternet.com
To:          kae@winternet.com

Dear Winternet User:

I thought you might be interested in the following when deciding whether to 
stay at Winternet or to go to some other provider.  If you do not read the 
usenet groups winternet.announce and winternet.general you might have missed 
some important news.  For your information I am neither a former or current 
Winternet employee.  I am a concerned customer like yourself.

The official posts have been misleading.  Here is some information that wasn't 
in the official posting, and other information that was only mentioned in the 
usenet groups winternet.announce or winternet.general.

2,500 EMAIL MESSAGES WERE NEEDLESSLY LOST BY WINTERNET ON THURSDAY, 7/11

Michael Frankowski, of Winternet said that "It is estimated, by our backup 
servers, that we lost about 2,500 pieces of mail during this time."  According
to Mr. Frankowski, it could also happen again, as the new Winternet hasn't 
been able to figure out the underlying problem.

This happened because the new administrators had made a mistake when they were 
reconfiguring the mail server.  The staff was unable to fix their mistake and 
eventually had to have a consultant, Jim Williams, help them figure out the 
problem.  There are many things that Winternet could have done to avoid the 
lost mail, as I said in a news posting (take a look at winternet.general or 
email me if you want particulars).  The problem should have been quickly 
evident to the new administrators had they been familiar with the mailing 
program.

Even now, there are reports of lost email continuing.  The new Winternet has 
not responded publicly to these reports.  If you have lost email, you should 
notify Winternet, so they will perhaps take action.

DOWNTIME OVER THE FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND WAS NOT NECESSARY

On Friday, June 5, the entire staff at Winternet was fired by Michael 
Frankowski and Kevin Mathison  (including one customer who happened to be in 
the office who was erroneously thought to be an employee). No one who used to 
work at Winternet is left. Right now the people who work at Winternet have 
little experience being an Internet Service provider.

On July 6th,  the new staff began to reset and reconfigure Winternet's 
network.  Because they had not asked for all the passwords before terminating 
the entire staff, they had problems getting into some of the machines.  In 
particular, the routers, which provide for basic network connectivity, gave 
the new staff trouble.  They erroneously thought that the routers needed to be 
completely reconfigured if the password was lost.  This wrong assumption is 
why Winternet was completely down on Saturday, July 6th.  Also they failed to 
ask for the current router configurations, with would have helped in the 
recovery.  Therefore, there was a needless service disruption.

It is also important to remember that the new administration knew there was 
going to be a major disruption when they decided to reconfigure all the 
routers from scratch, and made a decision to not inform their customers 
beforehand of this disruption.

Also, many of the modems had problems throughout most of last week.  If you 
were having problems with your modem connecting but not working, chances are 
that the problem was due to the fault of the new administration breaking 
things when they reconfigured things needlessly.  Also, if Winternet was not 
accepting your password, this would have also been because of the needless 
reconfiguration.

Their official word is that routing had been 95% working by Monday, July 8.  
However all traffic until last Friday was going out the mr.net connection, 
which means that the routing was only 66% restored. And even now, their 
routing has the opposite problem, as most of the traffic is going out the 
AlterNet connection, which has half the bandwidth as the mr.net connection. 
This means that the connection to the Internet is slower than it should be.
Their local network still has problems as well which slows down access to 
data local to Winternet.

Also, many of Winternet's machines have had problems because they have not 
been adequately administered.  They have had problems with drives filling up, 
machines rebooting, processes hanging, and other things that happen when 
servers are not monitored.

The knowledge of the administrators seems to be spotty on some issues, such as 
mail, usenet, and IRC.  They have shown that they do not have the skills 
necessary to run an ISP effectively.

In summary, the new Winternet has caused needless downtime through, I believe, 
negligent behavior.  I urge you to consider if you want to continue to deal 
with people who are not honest about what is really going on, and seem to 
lack the needed expertise and commitment to customer service to ensure you
will receive Internet access.

If you have any comments or questions you may email me at steved@winternet.com. 
You should also make a point of reading the Winternet newsgroups: 
winternet.announce and winternet.general for the latest information.

If you are interested in contacting the previous administators of Winternet,
Mike Horwath and Doug McIntyre, they are now administrators at Vector Internet 
Services.  Their email addresses are drechsau@visi.com and merlyn@visi.com.


Sincerely,


Steve Devore
steved@winternet.com