Month: September 2000

Tue Sep 26 14:17:11 PDT 2000 — Cidera will be upgrading the service adaptor serving our satellite downlink for Usenet news tonight to add additional streaming media features. Expected downtime is five minutes, and the news server should catch up with new articles shortly after that by using the redundant terrestrial links. -Dane

Mon Sep 25 19:32:15 PDT 2000 — As part of some troubleshooting we are conducting with our Focal lines, we reset a PRI in the Focal hunt group. This reset caused the disconnection of four subscribers, and we’re sorry for that brief interruption. This testing is intended to help us track down a problem with the hunting of our Focal lines. Unfortunately, the trouble only manifests itself during peak periods like Monday night. -Scott and Steve

Fri Sep 22 17:31:28 PDT 2000 — Sunday morning 2:00am we will be shutting down out UUNET circuit for maintenance expected to be completed by 4:00am. Connectivity will still be available through our Cable and Wireless circuit and we will be monitoring it for any problems -Scott and Kelsey

Thu Sep 21 08:52:51 PDT 2000 — We experienced a full mail spool volume this morning and part of last night which may have caused an error message when retrieving e-mail, this error message would look something like “ERR error locking your mailbox” I have cleared up some space on the mail spool and all looks well now. Sorry for any problems this may have caused. No email was lost while this occurred. -Steve

Wed Sep 20 17:58:26 PDT 2000 — On Thursday, September 21st at 2am, we will be rebooting our core router, Mega. Cisco requested we capture diagnostic information during the boot process to troubleshoot a bug we have found with Mega’s operating system. Global connectivity will be unavailable for about 3 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience. Incidentally, we are well into the planning stages for a redundant router configuration, one in which a core router reboot will not effect global connectivity. -Scott

Tue Sep 12 12:27:14 PDT 2000 — Many BroadLink customers are currently offline, and they are investigating to pin down the trouble. Initially, it looks like it may be a problem with their primary ATM router. Currently, we have no ETR from BroadLink, but they expect to resolve this quickly. Shane is on the way to the Sonic.net data-center to check the equipment now. -Dane, John (BL) and Shane (BL)

Tue Sep 12 02:18:13 PDT 2000 — Tonight’s upgrades. Tonight at midnight, we upgraded our core router (Mega) and the machine serving additional email boxes (“Mailbox”, aka Tsunami).

Mega’s upgrades includes a new operating system, which supports more features in our Cisco 7507. Tsunami’s upgrades include RAM and a faster network card. We also moved mailbox email storage to our Network Appliance, which should improve performance, and provides excellent data assurance. -Kelsey & Scott

Wed Sep 12 13:33:35 PDT 2000 — We apologize that this update didn’t make it into the MOTD sooner. The Broadlink problem was solve by swapping in a new primary ATM router, and we were all impressed with the speed with which Shane synced the new router’s config with the old and brought it online. -Shane(BL), Dane, John (BL), and Scott

Mon Sep 11 18:33:46 PDT 2000 — Tonight at midnight, we will be doing upgrades on our core router, mega.sonic.net and on the machine serving additional email boxes, mailbox.sonic.net, aka tsunami.sonic.net.

Mega’s upgrade will include a new operating system, and it will be rebooted to load this OS. Downtime is expected to be around three minutes, during which Internet access will not be available. Local email, news, shell and other services should not be affected.

Tsunami’s upgrades include RAM and a faster network card, and downtime will be around 15 minutes, during which time add-on email boxes will be unavailable. We will also be migrating user data from the local disk over to the redundant Network appliance equipment. During this migration, some email delivery may be delayed for a few minutes. -Dane (for Scott and Kelsey)

Sun Sep 10 16:35:00 PDT 2000 — UUNet problem solved. UUNet engineers reset some ATM interfaces in San Francisco, and the problem went away. We noticed the problem because we constantly monitor the path over UUNet between here at Sonic.net and ora.com in Sebastopol. Members probably didn’t notice, as this is a path that we only use to talk to a few sites — traffic to the Internet in general takes a different path. -Scott and Dane