Month: December 1999

Fri Dec 31 10:03:55 PST 1999 — The free DSL equipment, setup, book and installation offer has been extended through midnight tonight. Today is the final day to order DSL and get free equipment and a free book. Installation and on-site setup is also free, so if you’ve been considering DSL, today is the day to order! Save $198 on the equipment, get a free copy of ‘DSL for Dummies’ and get on-site setup and installation at no charge. For full info, see our PacBell DSL sales page:

www.sonic.net/sales/dsl/pacbell/

Thu Dec 30 08:57:54 PST 1999 — Sonic.net will be closed on Saturday January 1st for New Years day. Technical support will be available on Sunday morning at 9am. If you have very urgent issues, email support@sonic.net and staff will be monitoring this email queue. We don’t anticipate any major Y2K issues here, and we look forward to a smooth new year. Celebrate safely, and have a great new year! -Dane

Thu Dec 30 08:54:55 PST 1999 — Today is the final day to order DSL and get free equipment and a free book. Installation and on-site setup is also free, so if you’ve been considering DSL, today is the day to order! Save $198 on the equipment, get a free copy of ‘DSL for Dummies’ and get on-site setup and installation at no charge. For full info, see our PacBell DSL sales page:

www.sonic.net/sales/dsl/pacbell/

Thu Dec 23 19:31:45 PST 1999 — About 20 minutes ago, our network came under a ‘denial of service’ attack. This disrupted local and Internet traffic for about 15 minutes, we have isolated the source and are filing security reports with the networks in question now. – Eli, Steve, Kelsey, Scott.

Thu Dec 23 17:36:12 PST 1999 — News.sonic.net was unavailable for about 15 minutes this afternoon, it required a long reboot and filesystems check, and is back online now. – Eli, Scott

Wed Dec 22 09:36:56 PST 1999 — Storm, our web server that hosts www.sonic.net and a few other multihomed domains had a kernel panic this morning. It required a system reboot and may have made the sonic.net web page unaccessible for a few minutes. – Steve, Kelsey and crew

Wed Dec 22 17:18:46 PST 1999 — Sonic.net will be closed Friday December 24th and Saturday December 25th for the holidays. Have a great holiday weekend! Support will re-open on Sunday, and our main office will be open on Monday. -Dane

Thu Dec 16 18:08:53 PST 1999 — As part of our ongoing effort to speed up the delivery of mail, we have made a processor upgrade and doubled the amount of RAM in Prop.sonic.net, which is one of the six servers we use to process inbound mail. We’re seeing better performance, and efforts continue. Eli, Scott, and Kelsey

Wed Dec 15 14:19:36 PST 1999 — Due to a problem with an e-mail server that we are still investigating, it appears that we may have lost or deferred some percentage of the email that was received here on Tuesday and early Wednesday morning.

Internet e-mail transport is designed to be completely fail-safe, and in fact the logs on the server indicate that it was successfully making deliveries, but it does not appear to have been actually writing the messages to the user’s mailboxes. The design of the e-mail transport protocol does not allow for this type of failure, and we’re currently doing testing to duplicate and characterize the problem. When the trouble was discovered, the server was taken offline immediately, and it is no longer handling any email. This server is one of our six e-mail hosts, and it shared the overall e-mail processing load.

Our logs do include full information on the addresses of all senders and recipients, and each individual Sonic.net user who has been affected will be sent a list shortly including the date and time of each message that should have been delivered, plus the senders e-mail address. In addition, Sonic.net will be proactively informing each e-mail sender from whom a message is missing about the details of that message so that they can re-send any missing messages from their sent-mail folders.

We’re very sorry about this uncharacteristic failure, and we are working to minimize it’s impact by informing senders and recipients now. -Dane, Scott and Eli

Tue Dec 14 08:36:11 PST 1999 — The mail server handling outbound email for most customers had a number of problems overnight, and I’ve made some changes to fix this trouble. It was having some problems restarting sendmail during a scheduled reload, leaving the system without a mailer deamon running. Users trying to send mail from a SMTP client via mail.sonic.net would have received a message about a refused connection, and any outbound email would remain in their outbox. During the next attempt, all that email will be processed.

We spent much of yesterday backlogged by about an hour on email, and we brought another mail server online Monday afternoon to handle the load. These changes should allow us to stay caught up with the huge email volume that we’re handling here now. Sorry about the quirky behavior and delays, we’ll keep an eye on things this AM to make sure that our six email servers remain stable and fast.