What is the deal with Aretta?

[Dan Lawrence]

My deal

I normally don't stoop to this level, but if you're going to rake us through the coals in a public forum, I cannot and will not sit idle and let it go on without a response. This is my final letter to Mr. Lawrence.

Dan,
I want to clearly express my dissatisfaction regarding your negative public postings surrounding your experience with my company that all of us here at Aretta have worked so hard to build. Our employees spend tireless hours supporting our customers regarding every little issue they may have with Asterisk, be it configuration, trunking, VICIDIAL, A2Billing, custom scripts and every endpoint device known to man. When they come to me with support tickets like this, it hits hard.

I want you to know that we have supported the PiaF project since its inception by hosting thousands upon thousands of ISO downloads from our datacenter, on our dime. We have provided free virtual machines for the entire PiaF team to build and test the distributions. We have gone out of our way to support this project and quite frankly, I am appalled that you would launch a negative attack on us in a public forum. It's unprofessional, and damages the goodwill we worked so hard to provide to the entire PiaF community.

Had you of worked constructively with us, as the entire PiaF development team has, as opposed to turning this into a Lylix vs. Aretta bakeoff, we would have been more than accommodating to spend plenty time to resolve your issues that were caused primarily as a result of you not logging into SSH properly. The welcome email, which was sent 22 minutes after you ordered at 4:40AM Eastern time, clearly explains how to log in properly via SSH. I'm sorry that your domain doesn't receive email from us, that was unfortunate. Had you of picked up the phone and given us a polite call instead of launching a condescending support ticket out of the gate, we would have been more than happy to walk you through the entire login process and get you going, as we do with all of our customers, even those with just our SIP Trunking offering. We're in Atlanta, GA, home of good old Southern Hospitality which unfortunately you never got to experience.

Had you of worked constructively with us, you would have also learned that you were running THE LATEST AND GREATEST VERSION of PiaF, VERSION 1.1.1, UNRELEASED TO THE PUBLIC. You were the very first user of this "brand spankin new template" outside of the developers of the entire project. Most would chomp at the bit to be able to work with things like that, as anyone running PiaF is in it for the thrill of the latest and greatest code.

There are so many good people we have met and worked with in this entire community that are all in this together, for the good of the project. It is clear that this is not your objective and you have other motives. For that, we feel it is in our best interest to stop supporting you.

We have honored your request to terminate service and as I stated previously, all money received has been refunded.

Sincerely yours,
Marc J. Fribush
President
Aretta Communications, Inc.

I posted this privately in the Aretta trouble ticket, but since we have gone public, I'll post it here as well...


Fair enough. I wish you and your company no ill will. I hope that we can both learn something from this experience.

I do not feel I was in any way erroneous in my public postings. If you feel I stated something incorrectly, please let me know and if I agree I will be happy to post a public retraction.

I fail to see how my sharing and seeking experiences from others could be construed as launching a negative attack. I made sure to post my problems as well as their successful resolutions. You seem to be upset with others posting their opinions in the thread. If that is the case, then I suggest you take the matter up with them.

I am surprised you would blame me for not following your email instructions when this support ticket clearly shows the problems I had getting any email communication from Aretta. I went out of my way to set up a second contact in the control panel with an alternate email address in case the problem receiving email was on my end. I never got an automated message sent to that address even though I set it up to also receive all email communications.

I also checked the "My Emails" section of the Client Area regularly. There was only ever one email there and it was the initial welcome message telling me I would get another email after the server was created.

I had to ask twice for my credentials to be sent to me and when I did receive them I only got the password info. I did not get any of the welcome text.

I don't see what I could have done differently to avoid the problems. I do prefer electronic means to voice communication since people tend to be clearer and there is a record of the entire event. Your company provided these means through your trouble ticket system which I appreciated and made use of. At no time did I feel like I was being ignored or given false information - if I had, I would have been more inclined to pick up the phone to get to the bottom of the problem.

Please educate me - how could I have stated my problems in such a way that I would be working constructively with you.

As to the fact that you are providing PiaF version 1.1.1, I have two reactions.

First, I had no idea it was not the same release that I had personally downloaded and later updated. The only version information I could find was provided by the command help-pbx which stated "Date 122007 Version 1.2.1" which was quite a bit behind the current updates. My first inclination was to execute 'update-scripts' followed by 'update-fixes' which is the standard procedure. When I found that update-scripts was missing, this confirmed my suspicion that the code was not up to date and I followed the advice of Tom King and installed the update-scripts script.

Second, why in the world would you run a release other than the public version that everyone would expect unless you posted giant flashing warning signs at every turn making it clear that this was a pre-release version? This seems extremely counter intuitive to traditional thinking when it comes to production systems. I'm not sure what kind of people you think use PaiF in a hosted production environment, but I feel confident saying that they are not the kind of people who "would chomp at the bit to be able to work with things like that, as anyone running PiaF is in it for the thrill of the latest and greatest code." We are talking about hosted production systems here - bleeding edge code is generally frowned upon.

My personal motives are very simple. I am searching for a hosted PaiF production system which suits my needs without being too much trouble to administer. Nothing more, nothing less.

I am completely willing to accept the blame for my own inexperience. This is my first attempt at a hosting solution and there are clearly some mistakes that I made. I completely didn't grok that you were allowing shell root access to the system. I assumed that the user77 account was all that I was given - an assumption that was clearly wrong. Once I got that, things started getting better for me. I did in fact enjoy a few hours with the system after I got everything properly set up. It did function as advertised and I did not have any complaints.

I understand why you decided to honor my request to terminate service and I hold no ill will. I wish Aretta well and hope you do find success with your VoiP offerings. A rising tide lifts all boats and I believe we all benefit when we all succeed.

If you would like to continue to discuss these events, I would be happy to do so as long as the goal is figuring out what went wrong and what each of us can do to help avoid these pitfals in the future. If you do not want to discuss this further, I completely understand.

Sorry things didn't work out,
-Dan

 

[Dan Lawrence]

ATTN: Ward

Ward,

I wanted to take a moment to publicly apologize to you about the direction that this thread took. I still don't think I did anything wrong, but I fear this may have strained your relationship your Marc and Aretta Communications.

If this is the case, I am truly sorry.

-Dan

 

[darmock]

Since Ward is away at the moment I will post the developers comments.

Dan your apologies should be directed at Marc and Aretta and not the developers I suspect. They have been nothing but supportive of all we are trying to do and I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt. You seem to have been the first user of the new hosted system and a few bugs are bound to creep in. The only difference between the 1.1 and 1.1.1 is that some of the code has been tightend up and I hate to tell you but if you have been using our update path you are already using PIAF 1.1.1! As developers we tend to release bits and pieces of stable code to the users and eventually a new version is released when it reaches critical mass.

Ostracizing a company such as you have is uncalled for and it tends to set back the whole development process of PIAF. We do the development of the product because of sponsors just like Aretta who provide us with support we need. If they were to pull their support from the project well lets just say it would cause the project to stall. Unfortunately the PIAF dev team does NOT have a large corporation paying our development costs and we generally fund it out of our own pockets. (With donations along the way from corps and individuals - thanks Mark and all the rest of you who provide tangible support for the cause)

This message has also left me in a bit of a quandry. Technically it meets my criteria for a flame and thus needs to be purged (BTW in case some of you start asking about what standards etc just look at the messages in this thread this is a textbook example) I left the TB forums exactly because of this behavour (and being threatend with physical violence) and I really don't want to see these types of threads here.

I don't believe necessarily in censorship but am willing to make an exception in this case.... I am not going to close this thread for the moment.

So now I have ranted and I am off for a day in key west and won't be looking at this thread for a bit... Hopefully there won't be too many flames when I get back

Finally thanks to everyone who helps the PIAF team with this endevour. This is through their positive contributions in the forums, technical support when we get stumped, Direct submissions of hardware to the PIAF team (I still hate CISCO!), Or direct monetary donations. These have all helped!

Best regards and it is Saturday turn off your computer and go for a walk

Tom

 

[rugby]

I've read the posts here and I'm not sure what the big problem is (maybe I'm dense on a saturday morning). Dan was trying to get enrolled in a new hosted PIAF service and it wasn't what he expected. The company had problems getting him setup. Dan brought his issues to the forum and people tried to help him. The fact that the company was a HUGE contributor to the project shouldn't factor into this. What if it was another company unrelated to the project? Would it matter then?

He signed up for a service that would appear to not be fully baked yet. That happens in this day & age. I didn't see anything posted that was a flame IMO.

That's just my opinion on the issue. Everything SEEMS okay, just a customer dis-satisfied with the service that happened to be a huge sponser.

 

[cosmicwombat]

My 2 cents...

While not exactly flames... Pretty close. The bit that stood out for me is
mr. emtty. Dude if you are going to troll the competition then lets see a signature that identifies you as someone from Lylix.

Dan, for you the moral to the story is age old. Something like "You attract more bees with honey..."

Marc, I hope that you don't always consider posting here "stooping to a level."

I posted a link to lylix because when I went to Aretta's site, I didn't see any PBX in a Flash there. Not to elicit a flame war.

I see it now has been added to the "choices."

Where I am at a loss here, is that there is no announcements that I can find. I saw the pbx management from Joe and know that something "Hosted" was in the works from here. Is this it?

 

[frontline]

Closing this thread might be a good thing. I would not favor altering or deleting it. It is extremely informative on many levels. A different thread dedicated to hosting providers "bake off" could also be good. We do that all the time with ITSP's why not hosting. Having the information to evaluate your purchase shouldn't be considered flaming. As long as it isn't.

 

[Dan Lawrence]

Let me take this opportunity to apologize to Marc, Aretta, and anyone else negatively impacted as a result of this discussion thread.

It was never my intention to ostracize Aretta or cause problems or hurt feelings. It is clear that for some this is exactly what happened and for that I am very sorry.

I would like to point out that once I got through my initial troubles and got everything set up, I had a good experience with their PiaF system. I suspect if I had received the initial welcome message, none of this would have happened.

 

[darmock]

Thanks Dan for the response. As for the rest I do believe in the right to voice an opinion but this went a little further and was counterproductive to a good relationship that the PIAF team has established with Aretta. If you have further comments about providers please post them in a new message as this has gotten off topic I am afraid.

Best regards to all and yes Key West has good conch


TOm