Month: April 1998

Sat Apr 25 10:03:27 PDT 1998 — We had some authentication problems this morning which may have cause some of our customers to not be able to log in. In resolving this problem, we also had to reboot a few of our terminal servers. We apologize for any inconvience this may have caused. -Brian

Tue Apr 21 18:23:43 PDT 1998 — The access server which supports our v.90 pilot (nas22.sonic.net) had problems this afternoon, and we had to replace and reconfigure it’s route controler. 522-1389 was unavailable for a while this afternoon during this work. The failure occured while trying to upgrade the unit to a new engineering release of the operating system which is supposed to fix problems with the units rebooting. We’ve been experiencing this intermittently with nas21.sonic.net which serves 522-1003. If the OS had worked well on nas22, we would have upgraded nas21. -Brian (he did all the work)

Fri Apr 17 21:53:08 PDT 1998 — At approximately 3am tomorrow (Saturday) morning, we will be rebooting some servers to make changes to their operating systems. Included are www.sonic.net and mail.sonic.net — they will be unavailable for a a minute or two during the reboot. We apologize for any inconvenience. -Scott

Wed Apr 15 01:37:21 PDT 1998 — Our T3 to UUNet is currently offline due to PacBell maintenance. Pacific Bell estimates that they will be finished in about an hour, and says that they did not anticipate taking any customers offline. As our two T1 circuits are very lightly loaded at this time of night, you should not notice any impact at all due to this. Redundancy is very important in an ISP – remember that when you’re shopping around! -Dane

Tue Apr 14 15:03:38 PDT 1998 — A power event a few minutes ago made a reboot necessary on our Pop Mail, and List delevery hosts. The event was interesting in that it bypassed our backup power supplies! Total downtime was less than 15 minutes, during which Email services were not available. Sorry for the delay! -Eli

Update – it wasn’t a power event, it was a network attack. Someone sent an improperly formed packet to a huge number of systems on our network, and some which had not been updated crashed and rebooted themselves. Affected systems were tsunami (add-on mailbox accounts), afterburner (list processing), marine (outbound mail relay), blam and slam (local routers) and a few tech workstations. These systems had not been updated to Linux kernel 2.0.32+. Shouldn’t happen again, they’ve all got new kernels! -Dane

Thu Apr 9 10:38:12 PDT 1998 — UUNet has been experiencing routing instability since about 8am this morning. This can cause connectivity problems with some networks on the Internet. We’re working to get an ETR, and evaluating what we can do to minimize impact to our customers. (Fortunately, our Sprint and MCI connections are fine. 🙂 -Scott