So, my current place of employ (for another 3 weeks and 1 day) have a bunch of dedicated servers from a large hosting company in the UK, occasionally they break their already truly broken internal networking (yes, it defaults to blocking nearly all TCP ports between servers in their own data center, but if you want to hit those same ports from outside their network, that's absolutely fine!), I get to deal with the same thread at least once a quarter, when something in their network decides to block one of the few ports that are allowed... that port is 22, and ssh is used "rather a lot" between the approx 50 servers we have with them. Just for shits and giggles, all of their infrastructure filters ICMP making traceroute mostly totally useless. tcptraceroute ain't no better. Repeating the same question, asking for what they did when it magically all then works again, and getting a "we didn't do anything!" response is somewhat taxing, almost as taxing as watching them run commands on the servers and them not actually know what they're doing, but appear to have a vague grasp on iptables being a firewall, and that they can maybe read the rules and go, "oh, you weren't lying.". Their support is also so far lagged that it's ridiculous, other than an auto response, it took 3 hours (during office hours) to get a "oh, yeah, what you've said, that all looks good, now give us access so that we can diagnose further..." when you do give them that... it'll be between 4 and 6 hours before they bother logging in, and closer to 8 to 10 hours for them to go "oh, it works now, but I don't know why!". NYARGH. These guys make bedroom ISPs look professional to the max. The only thing they have almost going for them is that if you order a new dedicated server it is usually spun up within the hour.

And here endeth the vent.