Month: September 1999

Wed Sep 15 12:08:32 PDT 1999 — We’re working on deployment of a massive new core network switch right now. The unit is an Extreme Networks Black Diamond 6800. This new core switch augments our existing Summit 48 from Extreme, which is now full. The Black Diamond supports up to 256 Ethernet ports running at speeds up to 100 Megabits full duplex, or up to 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports running at 1000 Megabits full duplex, or a mixture of both. It weighs in at over 100 pounds, has two new dedicated 208v circuits (Thanks O’Rourke Electric!) and the fan/blower array generates enough wind to mess up your hair. With a 64 Gigabit non-blocking backplane and capacity for over 48 million packets per second, it’s the fastest Ethernet switch available. In addition to conventional Ethernet layer two switching, the Black Diamond includes layer three TCP/IP routing at full wire speed. For techies who want to see more, including a photo of this monster, check out Extreme’s product info at:

www.extremenetworks.com/extreme/products/blackdiamond.htm

Steve Johnson and Dave Jordan are working on the wiring of the patch bays for the new switch, and will be migrating some of our equipment over to it today. The migration is expected to be seamless, and will be done gradually over the next couple weeks. -Dane

Wed Sep 15 12:06:36 PDT 1999 — We’ve created a new newsgroup for discussions about DSL. It’s available at:

news:sonic.dsl

During the month of September, we’re giving away a book on DSL to all new DSL customers, so if you’ve been considering DSL, now is a good time to act.

Tue Sep 14 12:32:35 PDT 1999 — One of our mail servers decided to act up at around 11:30am This would have caused authentication problems when checking your mail. I re-booted the machine and all is well. -Steve

Fri Sep 10 11:05:23 PDT 1999 — Thunder, our web server choked up on some inode errors today. We are taking it down for the next 20 minutes to do some system disk maintenance. This will affect multihomed web pages. sorry for any problems this may have caused. – Steve and Eli

Fri Sep 10 16:47:32 PDT 1999 — The problem with the email2spam gateway turned out to be with the news server; folks were complaining about long posting times. This has been corrected. You may notice a slight delay in email delivery as the mail queue clears. We apologize for the inconvenience. -Scott

Fri Sep 10 15:29:04 PDT 1999 — The email2spam gateway was causing problems on the mail server, so we’ve taken it offline for maintenance. However, you can still submit spam to the spam@sonic.net email address; it just won’t show up in the spam-can newsgroup. -Scott

Mon Sep 6 18:06:14 PDT 1999 — Don’t miss the nice article on high speed DSL access in today’s Press Democrat ‘D’ section. It’s available in most areas now. For more info on DSL, or to sign up, see our DSL page at www.sonic.net/dsl/. -Dane

Sun Sep 5 20:18:52 PDT 1999 — Someone did a flooding attack against our shell server, and we bounced the T3 as part of our diagnosis. Connectivity to some sites was slow or unavailable while the network converged. Generally speaking, these attacks happen because one of our shell using customers has pissed someone in IRC off. If you’re misbehaving in IRC, please save us the time and don’t. No bots, no mailbombs, no attacks, no netsplitting, no warez and no bull please. -Dane, Scott and Eli