So 1and1 kills Subversion this morning. Goodbye, 1and1.

This morning, while walking into the doors of the BCEC for another wonderful (and last) day at Drupalcon Boston 2008, I run my normal routine. What does that consist of? Well, nearly everything I do is either preceded or followed by some sort of Subversion interaction. I wrote about my Subversion obsession a few months ago. So normally I go about my business happily, whistling away while I commit changes to my FireFox profile after I just added a new bookmark, or updating my project files after drafting a new document to bring down 1and1 in some legal fashion. Unfortunately, this morning, I was greeted by a few things.

Upon logging into the server, I was notified there had been a remote hostname change. Weird. So I removed the DSA key for my server, and allowed the server to dump the new one on my box. No biggie.

When I finally did get logged in, I notice something odd. Usually, when I log into my box, the prompt looks something like this:

Instead, this morning, it looks like this:

OK, weird, but still not detrimental. So I attempt to run an 'svn status' on one of my checked out projects. Here's what happens:

(uiserver):u35668161:~/some/project/somewhere > svn status
svn: error while loading shared libraries: libiconv.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
(uiserver):u35668161:~/some/project/somewhere >

Great. Just wonderful. So I call 1and1, and tell them about my troubles. They said they'll escalate it to their 'tech guys'. Yeah, right.

So I decide to take things into my own hands and reinstall another copy of Subversion, because its obvious they did some maintenance to the server, and it may have conflicted with my oh-so-dangerous Subversion installation. So I install a fresh copy. I head over to the new copy, and into the /bin directory, and type 'svn'. Golden, I have no problems. So I move my stuff around so that the new copy is being referred to rather than the old copy. I log out, log back in, try it again, and I get the exact same error as before. Fail.

So 6 hours later, hoping the issue will go away by itself, I call 1and1 one final time. I got someone who I'm not even sure knew how to use a computer. I had to specify the difference between a server issue and a website issue, as well as the difference between SSH and FTP. Anyway, this dude comes to the conclusion (after putting me on hold for 10 minutes to evaluate the situation) that I'm running an unsupported (and probably malicious) application, and they cannot support it.

So now I'm looking for a new host. I'm particularly looking at one of Media Temple's DV servers, though I'm not keen on the 20G storage cap, or their usage of Plesk (though I thought about ordering a Plesk-less server).

I'd be glad to hear some thoughts on why this error above is happening in the first place, if anyone knows what 1and1 is pulling over there. I'd also love any recommendations on a decent VPS with a nice admin interface (I hate cPanel, and Plesk ain't all that hot, either).

</rant>

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