Sun Feb 27 02:36:35 PST 2000 — After some more issues, we’re now running the current general deployment of IOS on our core Cisco router. It’s still got one annoying issue which Cisco is working on for us now. We’ll need to do another upgrade when they have that resolution.
The news server power supply has been swapped. -Dane and Scott
Fri Feb 25 01:43:46 PST 2000 — The new OS version for our Cisco core router did not perform well, and we had to go back to the older release. The 100Mbps Ethernet interface was massively impacted under the new release, and the system was basicly unreachable. We spoke with Cisco, and have sent them a tech dump for analysis. Right now, a nice Cisco engineer named Dave in the England is analyzing the information and doing tests to duplicate and eliminate the problem. He says he should have some results by the end of his workday, 5PM GMT, 9AM PST, so if things go well there we should have information before we return to the office for our own workday. We’ll make any required changes and will try again this Saturday night after midnight.
We’ve put off the power supply swap in the news server until Saturday because we took longer than expected testing OS releases on the Cisco. -Dane and Scott
Thu Feb 24 17:41:57 PST 2000 — We will be upgrading our core Cisco router to a new version of it’s operating system tonight between midnight and 1am. We expect downtime of about three minutes while it reloads, and during this time, Internet access will not be available. The new OS version allows us to do additional load balancing to enhance performance, and also resolves a few bugs.
We will also be replacing the power supply in news.sonic.net tonight. We expect this system will be offline for about 15 minutes while we put in the new power supply and reboot. -Dane and Scott
Thu Feb 24 17:35:34 PST 2000 — The MOTD Archiver is back online. We have a complete record of every MOTD entry dating back as far back as Thu Jan 16 10:13:25 PST 1997. You can view the MOTD archive at www.sonic.net/info/motd-archive/ – Steve
Thu Feb 24 03:58:00 PST 2000 — The flash upgrade of the XXX-1003 and XXX-9811 dialup groups has been completed successfully. This new version of the Total-Control firmware will increase reliability on both dialup groups. Let us know ASAP if you experience an increase in connectivity issues on either of the XXX-9811 or XXX-1003 dialup groups. Also if you were using our test number you should switch back to the 522-1003 number now. – Steve
Wed Feb 23 11:49:37 PST 2000 — Thursday at 1:00am I will be flash upgrading the Total-Control dialup gear to the latest firmware. After testing this version of the firmware we have decided it is stable enough for our production machines. During this flash upgrade it may require that we reboot the gear a few times. This will affect the 707-522-1003 and the XXX-9811 Dialup groups. After the upgrade we should see much better performance on these lines. – Steve
Wed Feb 23 18:16:05 PST 2000 — While having broke the entire network with with a few quick keystrokes, Eli and I did manage to accomplish some good. Some of you may have noticed the slight 3 to 5 percent packet loss over PacBell dsl links. We discovered that the RedBack SMS had not properly auto negotiated a full duplex 100MB Ethernet link to the core switch. After forcing the link to 100MB full duplex there is no more packet loss. – Kelsey and Eli
Wed Feb 23 17:39:40 PST 2000 — A configuration snafu on our core switch knocked fridge, our NetApp file-server, off of the net for 3 minutes. All web, ftp, and email is stored on this server and was briefly unavailable. – Kelsey
Fri Feb 18 16:34:25 PST 2000 — We had to perform unexpected maintenance on prog-relay.sonic.net today. It bounced email with ‘user unknown’ errors while it was off-line. This only would have affected a small number of customers. – Kelsey and Eli
Fri Feb 18 14:55:16 PST 2000 — One of our pop3 servers had problems authenticating users, I restarted the authentication service and all seems to be fine. This would have caused about 10 minutes of ‘Invalid Password’ messages while checking mail. – Steve