Month: February 1998

Wed Feb 25 09:35:04 PST 1998 — Between 4:30am and 5am this morning, we had some network problems which brought a number of terminal servers offline. It appears that the news server was at fault. Scott was covering the graveyard shift and took care of things. -Dane

Wed Feb 25 14:06:34 PST 1998 — Our news server was offline briefly when it’s networking started having timeout problems. A quick reboot brought it back online. -Dane

Sun Feb 22 12:02:56 PST 1998 — While bringing up a backup ISDN connection for a customer who’s been affected by a PacBell fiber cut, we’ve goofed up routing on nas21.sonic.net, one of our terminal servers. We’ll have it fixed up in a few minutes. This only affects PPP users who are connected via nas21. -Dane

Sun Feb 15 10:38:22 PST 1998 — MFS’s fiber has been repaired. An MFS contractor who was apparently digging to install additional capacity damaged a large number of circuits. During the outage, traffic on much of the west coast and parts of the rest of the world was running a bit slower than usual. -Dane

Sat Feb 14 15:25:09 PST 1998 — Fiber cut in San Jose. About 10am this morning, some fiber optic runs in San Jose were damaged — since then, routing has been ‘less than optimal.’ Apparently repairs have been ‘hindered by weather,’ but WorldCom continues to repair the fiber. -Scott

Sun Feb 8 19:10:51 PST 1998 — The Sonoma County Independent is currently polling for it’s annual reader’s choice awards. Be sure to pick up a copy at your local coffee shop or newsstand, and please do vote in the catagory ‘Best Internet Provider’. =) -Dane

Sun Feb 8 19:09:02 PST 1998 — Sonic now offers technical support on weekends. Our new expanded support hours are 9am to 9pm, seven days a week. We hope that this makes the Internet even more useful for you. -Dane, Eli and the support staff

Sun Feb 8 19:06:31 PST 1998 — We’ve just added three new disks to our Network Appliance filer. Two of these are currently warm spares, and one has been added to the RAID array. Current storage in the filer is about 25 gigs, 76% full. Because of the NetApp’s hot swap capabilities, there was zero downtime during this upgrade. -Dane

Sat Feb 7 10:07:47 PST 1998 — New authentication server online. The authentication server checks passwords. In most cases, when someone (say, Ann) presents a password to one of our servers, that server doesn’t have any idea what Ann’s password looks like.

Instead, the server encrypts the password and passes it to our auth server. The auth server inspects the password and returns a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response — if the response is ‘yes,’ Ann can retrieve her popmail (or log into her FrontPage web, or transfer files to the FTP server, or what have you.) We find this security model very attractive, because it means we can store passwords on specially protected hosts.

But there is a problem — as we load up our auth server with more and more authentication tasks, Ann discovers that it takes her longer and longer to retrieve her popmail, or log into the shell host, or connect to our network. Clearly, we need a very fast authentication server. Since June, Dane and I have been working on one — and that’s what we’ve deployed this morning: a very fast authentication server. If you’re interested in the details, please visit news:sonic.programmer. -Scott

Sat Feb 7 04:01:05 PST 1998 — I’m testing our new authentication server — folks may notice strangeness with logins for the next hour or two. (Problems should be very rare — less than one failure every 10 minutes. -Scott