Month: April 2000

Sat Apr 15 09:51:55 PDT 2000 — Sonic.net has deployed a new home page. The new home page offers Sonic.net support and sales information in an easy to navigate format, and also brings you lots of great new local content. Movie listings, local weather and jobs listings are available. Information on city and county governments is online, plus local photo tours, schools and parks and recreation information. A local yellow pages tool allows you to find basic business listings and enhanced website listings.

The site is under continuous development, and we’ll be expanding the resources constantly. If you have any comments, ideas or suggestions, please post to news:sonic.general and let us know!

www.sonic.net/

Sat Apr 15 15:32:27 PDT 2000 — We are going to be doing a night ops tonight to upgrade the firmware in the Alteon switch and do a motherboard CPU and RAM upgrade on sonic.sonic.net. There should only be minimal impact to our customers while we do this work. Email and web services will be off- line briefly when we restart the Alteon and while we are working on sonic the member tools will be unavailable. We are going to start work at 1:30AM and will probably be done within an hour. Sorry for the short notice but we wanted to get this work done quickly to resolve some ongoing issues. -Scott and Kelsey

Fri Apr 14 10:36:18 PDT 2000 — Storm, the server that handles www.sonic.net crashed and needed a reboot this morning. It wasn’t offline off-line for more than a few minutes. On that note– lbwww.sonic.net, a test for our new web server load balancing is up and running and needs some testing. If you have any comments about the new server or run into trouble post to the sonic.help.www group and we will work out the kinks. -Kelsey and Dave

Fri Apr 14 18:57:00 PDT 2000 — In an effort to shift more traffic over to our new Cable and Wireless T3, we lost contact with our core router (routers can crash too, even though they aren’t supposed to) and that forced a reboot. This upset connectivity intermittently for about 20 minutes this evening. Sorry for the problem, and the good news is that our new circuit is up and running fully now. — Eli and Scott

Wed Apr 12 20:29:51 PDT 2000 — The new circuit to Cable and Wireless is UP, and the network has converged. This should improve our connectivity greatly, and we’ll notice even more performance benefits as we tune the circuit and routing tables over the next few days. We apologize for the transition hiccup, as this was designed to be a seamless operation. We’ve all been working hard to get this circuit turned up ASAP, and after weeks of work to do so, there is a fair amount of jubilance among our staff! If you have any questions, please post to news:sonic.net — Eli (The excited guy who got to actually turn up the circuit in the Cisco), and the entire Operations Staff at Sonic.

Wed Apr 12 20:03:10 PDT 2000 — We are working with Cable and Wireless to get our new T3 installed and running, this is causing some spotty performance on our other T3. Please bare with us on this and this will clear up shortly. Thanks – Eli and Steve

Tue Apr 11 11:50:08 PDT 2000 — We have implemented a newsfeed filter to help clean annoying SPAM, excessive cross-posts, and other garbage from the news server. In just the first few hours its already blocked out nearly 3000 bad posts. If you are interested in more information, I’ll be posting to sonic.general -Kelsey

Mon Apr 10 14:05:20 PDT 2000 — The replacement cache adapter arrived this morning and was promptly installed. However, it has been exhibiting the same behavior as the old hardware. After many calls to Cidera we appear to have stabilized the cache adapter and are awaiting a second replacement. Meanwhile, we added 2GB more spool for the *jobs* groups and 2GB more to sonoma.* and sonic.* to increase the article retention time in those groups. It appears that text groups are keeping articles for around 10 days and binary groups for around 3 days. We are continuing to work on increasing our article retention times and on developing some news SPAM filtering. -Kelsey and Eli

Fri Apr 7 12:52:14 PDT 2000 — We have taken the news server offline to initialize the new spool space that we added a few days ago. It is going to take about a half and hour to ‘create’ the spool files. We did not anticipate that it would be offline for more than just a few minutes or we would have done it in the early morning. Once it is back online it will have an additional 30GB of text spools and 90GB of binaries spool. We’ve also taken a few steps to optimize performance. -Kelsey and Eli

Fri Apr 7 18:41:49 PDT 2000 — The ‘cache adapter’ appears to be failing. It is black box hardware so there isn’t anything we can do until the the replacement arrives. Unfortunately since it is Friday night we probably won’t receive a replacement until Tuesday with a slight chance that it could arrive on Monday. Our terrestrial feeds are working fine but are only able to bring in about half the volume that the satellite link can. It’s ironic that this happened today after Eli and I had rushed to add 120GB of spool to the news server for the weekend. -Kelsey