Month: May 2000

Tue May 30 14:05:27 PDT 2000 — Thunder.sonic.net, our primary web server, detected an OS error and restarted a few minutes ago. Downtime was approximately three minutes. -Scott

Wed May 24 21:06:34 PDT 2000 — UUNet Security has finished their investigation, and our Shell Server is back to normal operation. The investigation took a lot of time/resources on UUNet’s part, but it paid off- UUNet has logs that will be essential to Law Enforcement, and we’ll be pursuing this matter. Shell services are only used by a small portion of our user base, but we are (naturally) upset by this event, and apologetic for the brief service interruption for our user base this afternoon. – Eli, and the Ops team at Sonic.net

Wed May 24 16:08:40 PDT 2000 — The denial of service attack has been filtered at the gateway, so the network is back to normal. However, while UUNet Security traces the source of the attack, the Shell Server (if you don’t know what this is it does not affect you) will be offline. – Eli, Scott

Wed May 24 15:34:55 PDT 2000 — We are currently under a denial of service attack and are in contact with our upstream providers to resolve the issues. The attack has forced us to reload our core router and we hope service restore as soon as possible. – Scott, Eli, Steve, Dave, and Kelsey

Wed May 24 15:17:37 PDT 2000 — Our T3 circuit to UUNet ‘flapped’ briefly a few minutes ago, causing routing problems and partial unreachability to the Internet for a few minutes. The circuit is up and functional now, we will continue to monitor status and advise. – Eli

Tue May 23 12:51:45 PDT 2000 — The pine fix only appears to work for the root user and not everyone else, so we’ll continue to work on this until its resolved. Its clearly generated only when you run pine, so most sonic.net users need not worry about the pine issue. -Dave

Mon May 22 11:20:49 PDT 2000 — The new shell email program PINE has been fixed to stop writing ‘Internal Folder Data’ messages to your email box every time you run the program. We offer thanks to the user Steve for locating this fix faster then our capable staff. -Dave

Thu May 18 08:43:22 PDT 2000 — Some people had problems receiving e-mail this morning. Our mail spool was full. I cleared out some old mail and things are looking good as of now. No mail was lost during this time. – Steve

Thu May 18 20:15:24 PDT 2000 — Pacific Bell is running behind on equipment deployment to serve DSL customers in some cities, and installation is taking longer than usual while they build out new equipment in the central offices. Affected cities include Petaluma, Santa Rosa, parts of San Francisco, San Jose and others. For Santa Rosa, they expect to have new equipment online early next week, so this has slowed delivery of some pending orders by as much as two extra weeks.

Sonic.net’s ‘free Internet access for a year’ offer is still available, and DSL is a better deal than ever before. DSL is a great way to get on the Internet, and it’s no wonder that PacBell is getting so many orders.

www.sonic.net/dsl/

Thu May 18 20:04:13 PDT 2000 — Our new Network Appliance filer has arrived, and we’re preparing for migration of the majority of our customer data to this unit. The Netapp filer hosts all user web data, most email and ftp space. The new filer will also be hosting shell home directories, plus we’ll be migrating mailbox account storage to it as well.

Our current filer has about 50 gigs of storage, and is 96% utilized currently. The new unit has over 100 gigs of storage in the initial configuration, and it can be expanded to up to 900 gigabytes. The filer has fiber-optic gigabit (1000Mbps) Ethernet and a much faster CPU, so we should see overall performance increases in web, mail, ftp and other areas. While the current unit has redundant power in the disk shelves but not the CPU, the new filer is fully redundant and will actually be served by two entirely separate UPS systems out of our new downstairs power room so that there is no single potential point of failure.

We’re hoping to migrate to the new unit around the weekend of June 3rd. There will be some downtime involved for hosted websites and users checking and sending email. Email will be queued up for delivery as soon as the migration is complete, and full backups have been made and will be maintained in case we have unforeseen troubles. We will post a more definite timeline and downtime projection once we have completed our migration planning. -Dane, Scott, Eli, Steve, Dave and Kelsey