What hit MTU 12/2000 - 02/2001 was HIGHLY UNUSUAL

[admin]

MTU went through an incredible sequence of problems, the likes of which we have never seen in 30 years in business! We thought you might like to know... just to keep you in the know. Sometimes, things happen that are beyond our control. Please keep this in mind when you are wondering why our support might not be perfect as normal.

1. KHPro was ripped and placed on a crack site. We were able to have it removed by heroic efforts within 3 days. Not much damage done.

2. Our website mail exchange IP addresses were changed somehow and we did not receive emails for a week. Our host - iServer-Vero Corp. - the largest hosting company in the world still has no explanation of what happened. VERY SCARRY!

3. Even though we use McAfee and Norton Anti-Virus programs, we received a worm virus that infected and severely damaged 4 of our office computers. It took everyone's efforts to overcome this and bring each computer back operational. Our support manager is our technical expert and for several days he was removed from the phones so he could concentrate on solving this problem, which he did. He was backed up with 300 emails to answer after this.. which is why Christi did not get her serial number.

4. We contracted with an e-Commerce design firm who was HIGHLY recommended by Verisign (the digital certificate SSL folks). They were to install their "proven" e-Commerce software and link with VeriSign/Signio as our credit card gateway. The contract was to have us on-line by November 24th They even added a self-imposed 15% penalty if they didn't have us up by December 1. I had to accept and wave their failure after Dec 1 and grant them an extension. About December 15th, our clients could finally charge credit cards, but not download our secured software products. That still requires a significant amount of Doug's time for each order as we have to manually generate the Serial Number, document it in our client database, prepare the email and make sure it goes to the correct person. January 5th, the firm hired a contractor to do some of the work on our site they had agreed to in writing, but finally realized they did not know how to do. This contractor broke our site in a disastrous way. One client charged $200 on his Mastercard and Visa debit cards a total of 23 times - $4,600 out of his account over the weekend!!! We spent hours tracking down the multiple charges that occurred over the 3 day period with EVERY ORDER that was placed. Then, we discovered that Signio was somehow automatically creating additional credits against our account back to clients! One was for $1,800 taken from our account and given to the client mentioned above. They acknowledge this is their fault, but can't explain it AND IT IS STILL GOING ON! This challenges our survival. Many of the multiple charge mistakes made by clients, brought us very irate calls. In most cases we had already responded even before someone called, and we solved each problem. By the way, this has probably caused us more lost time than all the others combined!

5. My personal ADSL line has been down at home for over 2 weeks. This is where I do 90% of my Forum and email support. Bellsouth has been out twice, and are coming again Monday.

6. Adaptec has created a 12.3 Richter scale Earthquake in PC-land! Their ASPI drivers have been available for other application software to use. No more! They now embed the ASPI function within their program and it is not accessable to us or others. There are 2 directions we are working on, but this is not good news. For some incredible reason, Adaptec has also decided that IDE drives don't exist any more. Their software appears to only work on SCSI drives now. MTUSUPPORT visited their site again today and searched far and wide before finally finding anything at all about ASPI. They definitely have changed corporate priorities. [font color=red]For now, DO NOT download any Adaptec software that might overwrite your ASPI driver. If so, you may have no way to go operational again![/font]

7. We have to close our books for 2000 Fiscal year. Last year we converted to QuickBooksPro from our CPA's doing our books for 20 years. This requires MANY changes and reclassifications of postings. We will probably file for an extension, but NC Property Taxes must be filed and paid by Jan 31. We had to make that deadline.

8. We had to upgrade our software security to prevent our products from being ripped again. That required much of my and MTUSUPPORT's time working with two of our programmers.

9. We are upgrading our internal NT server to provide a VPN (Virtual Private Network) so our programmers can properly use our SourceSafe software repository from home and not do their "own thing" that has caused delays in our developments. We contracted with a consultant weeks ago to do this. We either continue on his schedule or postpone until he is open again.

There was more, but I think you have an idea that on January 26, 2001 when this was originally posted, we were not in normal times.

On the positive side, sales continued to be excellent and we had the funds to do what is required. If we can just get all the gremlins out of Raleigh!