Month: August 2000

Fri Aug 18 16:33:00 PDT 2000 — Sonic.net is pleased to announce the launch of a new turnkey private dedicated server co-location offering.

www.sonic.net/sales/cobalt/

For customers who receive a moderate or heavy traffic load and who want the features and freedom of their own private web server, the RaQ is a great solution! Using a simple web interface, you can administer your website, and you can even host several websites on a single server. Other features such as optional email hosting, virtual server FTP hosting, mailing list management and more make the RaQ a great environment for your website and other services hosted at your domain name. Sonic.net is offering three levels of Cobalt RaQ servers to introduce this program; the RaQ 3, RaQ 3i, and RaQ 4r. All three RaQ systems include more than 10 gigabytes of hard disk, the Apache web server, support for Microsoft Frontpage extensions, CGI and Perl, telnet, ftp, ssh, and web interface administration.

Sonic.net is offering co-location with dedicated Cobalt hardware included starting at $195.00 per month. There’s no better way to get started with your own private server.

For further information check out our Cobalt co-location website at: www.sonic.net/sales/cobalt/

-Dane and Scooter

Fri Aug 18 15:24:09 PDT 2000 — After a few periodic lockups, we’ve replaced the equipment on the Santa Rosa end of our link to our San Rafael office POP. Downtime during the swap was less than a minute, and no users were disconnected. We hope that this will resolve the failures that we’ve seen which have caused a few brief interruptions at that POP. Note that redundant phone numbers that reach another POP are available for users in the San Rafael service area; see our support page to look up a list of local numbers for your location. -Dane

Fri Aug 18 15:20:14 PDT 2000 — Our primary Network Appliance storage array, freezer.sonic.net was offline for about two minutes due to a network cabling problem. It appears that the cable was not well seated in the Lucent patch bay here, and during replacement of other network cables, it came loose. The NFS storage array hosts all web, mail and shell data, and most servers here depend upon this data and paused while the filer was unavailable. -Dane, Steve, Kelsey, Scott and Scooter

Thu Aug 17 07:21:15 PDT 2000 — Sonic.net is featured in today’s New York Times! We’re very excited about this new national press coverage, so take a look at the article if you’re interested:

‘In Praise of the Mom-and-Pop I.S.P.’, NY Times, August 17, 2000

www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/circuits/articles/17ispp.html

A free NYT web subscription is required to read the article; if you sign up to read this, be sure to un-check the boxes which would request that they send you periodic emails if you don’t want them! We’ve asked the Times for reprint permission for publication on our own pages, but in the mean time, check it out on the NYTimes ‘On the Web’ site. (note, while they’re used in the article, the names ‘Sonoma Interconnect’ and ‘Sonic’ are no longer in use – we go by simply ‘Sonic.net’ as of 1998)

Many thanks to Katie Hafner of the NY Times, a long time Sonic.net customer for the work on this nice article. I know you read the MOTD Katie, so you’ll see this note of thanks! -Dane and the Sonic.net staff

Thu Aug 17 07:19:19 PDT 2000 — The Adtran T1 CSU/DSU serving San Rafael went down again, and we used the remote power management to bring it back up. Downtime was 20 minutes for this San Rafael POP. Note that for San Rafael customers, we’ve got six other backup phone numbers; see the local number lookup tool on the support page to get a list of dialups for your area. -Dane

Tue Aug 15 16:38:15 PDT 2000 — The DOS attack that was underway has been dealt with, and the UUNet link is no longer impacted. The cause of the attack was a compromised customer account being used to run bots in the IRC. Please note that bots are not allowed in most IRC networks, and customers running bots will be warned and terminated. Also, please do not use telnet from insecure locations, as your password may be compromised. Instead, use secure shell, ssh. Thanks! -Dane and Scott

Tue Aug 15 16:03:30 PDT 2000 — Our T3 to UUNet is under a Denial Of Service attack currently, and we are working with UUNet’s Security group. The symptoms will include slow Internet connectivity to UUNet connected sites but traffic destined for the Cable & Wireless link will flow normally. -Eli, Scott

Sun Aug 13 14:14:30 PDT 2000 — Cable and Wireless has resolved the problems, and we have re-enabled our T3 to them. Their explanation: ‘over-utilization of a router in Hayward caused problems in San Francisco and Atlanta.’ -Scott

Sun Aug 13 13:11:35 PDT 2000 — This evening, Sunday, Aug. 13th, we will be shutting down our T3 to UUNet to migrate from the current SMDS link to a new point to point on our new SONET OC-12 fiber facility. The new circuit offers greater reliability, less latency and more room to grow. The SONET OC-12 fiber entrance is a full sized seven foot tall telco cabinet with fiber running at 655Mbps offering capacity to terminate twelve T3/DS3 45Mbps circuits or six T3/DS3 and one OC-3 155Mbps circuit. We will be provisioning four of the six T3 circuits here into the OC-12 in the next few weeks. The fiber is connected in a dual ring configuration with fiber leaving our building and going South on Third, and also East on 5th Streets. This prevents the possibility of a fiber cut taking Sonic.net’s huge data circuits offline. -Dane and Scott

Sun Aug 13 13:11:19 PDT 2000 — Cable and Wireless (CW) is having serious problems on their backbone. We have shut down our T3 to Cable and Wireless, and are running on the UUNet T3. The CW problems caused multiple uncompleted connections to open on our mail servers, which may have resulted in a ‘connection refused’ for members trying to send out mail. Updates as they come in… -Scott