Month: May 1999

Fri May 7 17:10:23 PDT 1999 — We’ve upgraded the Sebastopol dialup pool to the latest versions of Livingston’s ComOs. This should reduce disconnects and V.90 compatibility issue. Let us know if there are any problems by e-mailing support@sonic.net – Steve

Fri May 7 15:45:32 PDT 1999 — We’ve upgraded RealAudio to the new RealSystem G2 Server. It supports streaming of all new formats from the most recent RealProducer software. For a full description of features, you can go to RealAudio’s site at this url: www.real.com/solutions/rg2features.html – Kevin

Thu May 6 11:08:35 PDT 1999 — This morning’s ftp problems were due to a single file — a game for the NeoGeo. From reading the connection logs, it appears that darned near the entire country of Japan is dogpiling on our FTP server.

Because of the impact, we are denying connections to our ftp server from the .jp domain. Even so, we are receiving about 7 connections per second from .jp hosts, which we suspect will continue until after prime-time (Japan time). Once that load goes down, we will re-enable access for the domain. -Scott

Thu May 6 08:48:30 PDT 1999 — The FTP server is also having some trouble, please ftp to bolt.sonic.net if you get a refused connection at ftp.sonic.net. We’ll have ftp.sonic.net back online shortly. -Dane

Thu May 6 08:34:09 PDT 1999 — The web server serving www.sonic.net had some trouble this AM, and we’ve fallen back to a backup system. We’ll be going back to the main host shortly. -Dane and Eli

Wed May 5 14:59:44 PDT 1999 — We ran stats on our dial groups this morning and found quite a few modems with problems. We’ve cleared these issues, and we expect less customers will have problems with ringing and no answer, or dialing and reaching silence. -Dane and Scott

Tue May 4 20:54:52 PDT 1999 — Because of the smurf attack, we’re still blocking ICMP echo replies to bolt.sonic.net. This means that ping and mtr will not function, but traceroute will. We’re taking steps to come up with a smurf protection which will allow these two diagnostic tools to continue to function.

For the people who are abusing IRC, let this serve as notice. We have reached the limits of our tolerance, and we will be cancelling accounts of customers who misbehave in IRC. Channel wars, bots and other attacks will not be tolerated, and your account will be deleted if you misbehave. It’s time to grow up. Your abuse is impacting other customers. For everone else, if you observe improper behavior on the shell server, please email support@sonic.net and let us know. -Dane and Scott

Mon May 3 17:36:00 PDT 1999 — We’re testing a new config at our Sebastopol POP, and if you’re using that dialup, we’d appreciate you testing it. Note that any toll calls are your responsiblity, so only dial this number if you know it’s local for you! The test number is 707-824-9930. This number is not part of a hunt group, so you should report your results to pm3test@sonic.net and then move back to the regular number to avoid busy signals. -Dane and Steve

Sun May 2 23:33:59 PDT 1999 — Our three network connections were all flooded with packets in a smurf attack this evening. We filtered the traffic on the T3 and shut down the other two circuits, and have just filtered the Sprint T1 and it’s back online now. We are working right now to get filters on the Cable and Wireless T1 so that we can bring that circuit back online as well.

This smurf attack is apparently in retaliation for our customers actions in IRC. I would like to reiterate that bots or any form of bad behavior in IRC will be cause for deletion of your Sonic.net account. Denial of service attacks affect other Sonic.net customers, and we don’t like dealing with these type of issues. -Dane

Sat May 1 21:26:27 PDT 1999 — Sunday morning maintenance. We will be performing maintenance on the following systems from 2:30AM until as late as 5AM:

News: filesystem checks. The news server will be unavailable for up to 30 minutes for a root filesystem check. It will then become available, but will be throttled for up to two hours for a check of the news spool’s filesystem. While reading and posting news will work as usual, posts will not appear in newsgroups until the server is unthrottled.

Web: Thunder, our web server for multihomes, will gain a new logging subsystem.

Net: Changes to the security filters in our border router may cause momentary loss of Internet connectivity. -Scott