general "best practices" question re: orphaned servers

Hi all,

I know many of you are colo providers whose customers resell the rackspace
they purchase from you. I suppose this is kind of a survey question -- I'm
trying to get an idea of what the generally accepted practice is in the
situation where resellers of rackspace go out of business and you are left
with their customers' hardware.


- How do you handle this case? Do you generally make any attempt to notify
the server owners (your customer's customers), i.e. through your customer
database or ticket tracker, or do you leave this entirely up to the
(possibly defunct) customer of yours?

- If you do contact them, do you offer to convert them to direct
customers, or do you simply ask them to retrieve the servers?

- Do you have a minimum and maximum time period for which you will store
"orphaned" servers?

- If you leave the process of contacting the server owners up to your
customer, what would you do in the case that your customer went out of
business, and there were unclaimed boxes after whatever your
storage/retention period was? Would you then make an attempt to contact
the owners before disposing of them?

- Is it necessary to contact server owners who are not your direct
customer, before disposing of or repurposing their servers in the case
that their provider (your customer) has gone out of business/is unable to
pay its bills?

- How do you generally dispose of unclaimed servers, for whatever reason?
Are there any security measures taken to destroy potentially sensitive
data?

- Is there any risk of liability if you don't do any of the above? (In the
case that the hardware is not the property of your customer, but a "down-
stream" client.)


That's enough for now. :) Thanks!


--Len.








-- 
Eat sushi frequently. - Avi
[email protected] is the human contact address.
[email protected] is the list posting address.
See below URL for subscribe/unsubscribe and list options:
http://inet-access.net/mailman/listinfo/list