Month: August 1998

Thu Aug 27 01:31:37 PDT 1998 — Starting sometime just before midnight, a criminal launched a ‘denial of service’ attack against our network. Service has now been restored; UUNet is continuing their investigation. -Scott

Thu Aug 27 00:47:53 PDT 1998 — Our network has been under attack for over an hour now. Work to track down the perpetrators and restore service continues… -Scott

Thu Aug 20 19:49:48 PDT 1998 — AboveNet is currently having router problems and our South Bay dialup users are being affected. The estimated time to repair is 20 minutes per the AboveNet network operations center. -Dane

Tue Aug 18 15:06:38 PDT 1998 — It seems we’ve found a bug in Cisco’s implementation of the OSPF routing protocol which caused our core router to reboot. Routes were unavailable for almost 10 minutes while the system came back online and stabilized. Sorry! -Dane

Mon Aug 17 14:56:20 PDT 1998 — We’re in the final phases of testing a new web server before deployment. The new server is faster, better, meaner and cooler, and includes lots of hardware and software upgrades. These include complete replacement of the older NCSA web server with Apache 1.3. Many new features and functions will be available. In order to make this transition as smooth as possible, we would like to ask that all users test their website on this new system as soon as possible. Websites with FrontPage extensions, CGIs, SSIs and other ‘fancy stuff’ are most likely to have trouble. If you don’t want your site to break when we put this online, please let us know ASAP if things don’t work by posting to news:sonic.help.www under a subject which includes ‘New server testing’. To test your site, replace ‘www.sonic.net’ with ‘storm.sonic.net’, eg www.sonic.net/dane/ becomes storm.sonic.net/dane/.

Mon Aug 17 14:31:34 PDT 1998 — We’ve completed migration of local website searching from ht://Dig to Kvack, our new homebrewed efficient-indexing tool. A simple proxy script has replaced the old htsearch CGI; ht://Dig-style searches will be automatically referred to Kvack. Kvack offers individually-customizable search output, among other features. For more information, see www.sonic.net/cgi_script/kvack.shtml. If you encounter problems, see the sonic.help.www newsgroup. -Devin

Fri Aug 14 11:16:49 PDT 1998 — In response to recently revealed security holes in many major email clients, Sonic has implemented server side security fixes. You may have read in the press about problems with long filenames and malicious code which affect Microsoft’s Outlook, Netscape Communicator and others. All affected applications now have new fixed versions available from their publishers, but we know that not all of our customers will upgrade. So, to protect you from this type of attack, we’ve implemented a slick new server side feature which detects long filename and malicious HTML attacks and modifies the email to make it harmless. Kudos to Eric for setting up this cool protection! -Dane

Fri Aug 14 11:15:40 PDT 1998 — We have deployed cool new tools to allow users to more easily manage their accounts. These new member tools are available at the following URL:

sonic.sonic.net:443/

Fri Aug 14 11:15:33 PDT 1998 — Sonic lost rather badly to IX Labs in our second annual softball game. I guess it just goes to show who the more technical and nerdy company is. Score was 46 to 6 at the end of the fourth inning, so we decided to move on to the BBQ at that point.

Fri Aug 7 18:17:07 PDT 1998 — Sonic tech support will be closed on Saturday the 8th for our second annual softball game against IX Labs. Last year they beat us pretty badly, so we’re hoping to do better this time. If you just happen to be a really amazing softball player and would like to come help us trounce them, we’ll be playing at Galvin park from 10am to noon. (It’s legal, last year they brought in one of their customers who used to play in the minor leagues, so we figure we can do the same. Maybe we have customer who play well..??) -Dane