Month: April 2000

Fri Apr 7 15:40:36 PDT 2000 — Our cidera satellite news feed was offline and we had to reboot the ‘cache adapter’ server to get the feed back online. As a result, our news volume may be a little less than normal today. Hopefully our five terrestrial feeds will be able to fill in all the missing holes. -Kelsey

Thu Apr 6 10:00:46 PDT 2000 — The current multihome web server, thunder.sonic.net had problems this morning at around 5am. Scott and I both came down to reset it, and all’s well. As it turns out, Lyons really is NOT a 24 hour deal – we had to go to Dennys afterwards for breakfast. =) Kelsey, Scott and Eli have been working hard to get our load balancing stuff all stable, and we seem to be there on the SMTP and POP now. I’m hoping that we can wrap up the web server load balancing in the next day or few, and once this is complete, a failure like this won’t be noticed at all by our customers. -Dane and Scott

Thu Apr 6 17:46:54 PDT 2000 — We are noticing a number of disturbances out on the backbone, mostly centered around CRL at this time. This problem may affect Sonic customers trying to access remote sites. For info, check out mdr.ihr.daze.net/ – Also note that while this affects our connectivity, it also affects the rest of the Internet and we don’t have any control over when it gets repaired. — Eli, Kelsey

Wed Apr 5 17:39:55 PDT 2000 — We’ve been getting more reports of two mail problems: 1) Mail being bounced with ‘user unknown’, and 2) mail to domainaliases being delivered to ‘real’ sonic accounts. To address this issue we analyzed logs on all four mail servers, and determined that (so far, knock on wood) Prop hasn’t had these problems. We’ve just completed duplicating Prop’s configuration on the other three mail servers: Sub, Ultra, and Buzz. Hopefully this will alleviate the problems we’ve seen. -Scott and Kelsey

Tue Apr 4 12:36:26 PDT 2000 — In two unrelated chains of events, we had two issues in the last 20 minutes. The ATM DS-3 that serves our PacBell DSL customers lost carrier for a period of about ten minutes, and near that time our Shell server ran into resource problems and had to be rebooted. Sorry for the rocky morning! — Eli, Dom, Kelsey and Scott

Tue Apr 4 11:22:56 PDT 2000 — news.sonic.net will be going offline this afternoon to add 150GB of additional spool and to be reinstalled into the proper rack mount case. We are more than doubling the existing spool since we did not anticipate receiving nearly 90GB a day of news feeds. We usually do this kind of work at night when they will effect the least number of people. Oddly enough, mid-afternoon is when the news server gets the lightest load– it must be the alt.binaries tree 😉 -Kelsey and Eli

Tue Apr 4 14:26:10 PDT 2000 — One of the mail servers in our group of four ran into issues this afternoon. The symptom was mail being bounced with a ‘user unknown’ message. It’s important to note that no mail was lost or misdelivered during this period, and the return message would lead remote users to attempt redelivery. We have three systems in place to prevent this issue, including our Alteon load-balancing switch, and we are working with Alteon now to obtain a warranty replacement for our unit. In addition, we have been working all morning to bring up new hosts to replace the servers in place, and the failed machine, ‘buzz.sonic.net’ was slated for an OS upgrade this very afternoon. The timing was unfortunate, as the work in progress will eliminate this issue for good. — Eli, Scott, Kelsey