Month: December 1997

Tue Dec 16 21:42:04 PST 1997 — Sonic’s offices will be closed on Thursday the 18th between 1pm and 2pm for a staff Christmas party. We will also be closing early on Christmas eve, Wednesday the 24th at 4pm. On Friday the 26th, we will have short hours, 9am to 6pm. Have a happy and safe holiday, and thanks for your patronage in 1997. -Dane

Tue Dec 16 15:48:58 PST 1997 — If you’re stopping by the office, consider bringing a toy or canned goods for charity. We’ve set up a drop box for food, and one for toys. We’ll be bringing them to St. Vincent dePaul early next week. Thanks to Chris for the boxes, and Mattie for setting this up.

Mon Dec 15 17:27:56 PST 1997 — It’s that time of year again – the Christmas season. Here at Sonic, we’re hoping that we’ve been good this year and will get presents in our stockings. If you’re in the area, please do stop by with something small. Here’s our Christmas photo and appeal for goodies:

www.sonic.net/christmas.html

Mon Dec 15 17:26:39 PST 1997 — An update on the MOTD above. After removing the new equipment, the re-charging UPS caused some problems, so we’ve done some rearranging. During this time, about 20 analog customers received ring-no-answer conditions. Sorry about that!

Mon Dec 15 13:49:59 PST 1997 — We just tripped a circuit breaker a while after adding some new equipment, and the UPS supporting out NetApp ran out of juice. For about 10 minutes, the web, shell and ftp servers lost access to the NetApp filesystem. Of course, the filesystem is robust and NVRAM backed up, so the system came back online reliably – and it boots in only 60 seconds.

Sat Dec 13 13:28:28 PST 1997 — We’re pleased to announce work on deployment in a number of new points of presence. This is a wonderful expansion of our current coverage area. The following lines are currently in a beta test stage, so if you’re in that area, please do give them a try and let us know how it goes. Mountain View 415-930-3610 Palo Alto 415-815-3610 Redwood City 415-480-3610 San Jose/Santa Clara 408-367-8004 408-933-3610 San Mateo 415-235-3610

Of course, check and make sure that anything you call is local – toll calls are not Sonic’s responsibility.

Wed Dec 10 10:49:48 PST 1997 — As of Wednesday, Pacific Bell has not yet been able to fix the troubles that we’ve had with busy signals in the switch. Basically, our X2/ISDN hunt group was configured as a sequential hunt instead of a multi line hunt, and the NorTel DMS100 won’t do sequential hunt beyond about 100 lines. We’ve got 192 lines in that group, and we’re not able to use them all! As this group serves overflow for the v.34 group, all users may get busy signals during our peak time in the evening on busy evenings – notably Mondays and Tuesdays. Pacific Bell is expediting the paperwork on this change order, and we’re expecting a final solution soon. -Dane

Mon Dec 8 17:29:45 PST 1997 — The RADIUS user authentication server is having problems keeping up with the load we’re placing on it, and this is causing an odd cascade failure effect with authentication. Basicly, each terminal server will make a request, wait one second for a response, and then ask again. If something causes responses to take slighly more than one second, they’ll all ask again, and this extra load makes it take longer, etc etc. Moving to a non-forked mode allows the system to continue to function, but it’s a bit slower. In other words, if you have trouble logging in, we’re working on it, please try again in a minute. -Dane

Mon Dec 8 17:28:31 PST 1997 — Our news server has some filesystem corruption on it’s main news storage disk, so we’re currently running in read-only mode while we check the filesystem. This should not affect your news reading or posting, however posts will be stored until the filesystem check is complete, and then injected into the feed. -Dane

Mon Dec 8 15:41:19 PST 1997 — Our news server is currently being rebooted, and will be back online in a few minutes. Sorry for the service interruption! -Dane