Month: March 2000

Tue Mar 7 17:52:12 PST 2000 — We are planning a massive power plant upgrade for our data center that will be implemented this Sunday morning between 2am and 3am. Many services will remain online including core routing, dialup access, DNS, shell and multihomed web hosting. Mail, FTP and Usenet will be offline. Expected power downtime is actually just about two minutes, but we expect the actual service downtime for these services to be around 20 minutes as we coordinate shutdown and restart of servers. The two minute outage is scheduled to begin at 2:15AM PST, Sunday March 12th.

This upgrade brings us to a redundant dual UPS configuration which eliminates the current potential for a point of failure in a single UPS. It also gives us the ability to add additional battery runtime, and it deals with some concerns about weight as the battery plant grows. -Dane, Scott, Eli and the rest of the ops (we’ll all be here!)

Tue Mar 7 17:21:51 PST 2000 — Our satellite newsfeed will be down for upgrades between 7pm PST and 8pm PST tonight. This means that we won’t get as much new Usenet news traffic during this hour, but it’ll come in after the downlink is back online. -Dane

Mon Mar 6 12:57:56 PST 2000 — Pacific Bell is reporting a widespread DSL outage in the Bay Area that is affecting some Sonic.net DSL customers. They currently report no estimated time to repair, but they are working hard on this issue now. If your DSL modem’s ‘sync’ light is blinking red, and your DSL is not functioning right now, this is PacBell trouble is likely the issue. If you have further questions, you could phone Pacific Bell repair, but we’ve experienced very long hold times in attempting to reach them. -Dane and Dom

Fri Mar 3 11:05:28 PST 2000 — Sonic.net is offering free basic Internet access for a full year, or a $198 rebate to customers who switch to high speed DSL. This brings the cost of DSL to within about $5 per month of dialup for customer who currently have a dedicated modem phone line that they could disconnect after moving to DSL, so we’re pretty excited about it. DSL is up to 50x as fast as modem access, so it’s an amazing value. For all the details, see my post to news:sonic.dsl, or check the information and sign-up form at:

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