Month: February 2001

Wed Feb 28 11:54:52 PST 2001 — Sonic.net is growing quickly, taking on many new customers from Metro.net and CableOne.net’s shutdown. Metro.net’s closure was covered in today’s Press Democrat, the story is at: www.pressdemocrat.com/business/news/28metronet_e1.html

We have one correction to the article – Sonic.net was not founded at the same time as Metro.net (1995), but was founded a year earlier, in 1994.

CableOne.net is ending Internet service as part of it’s acquisition by AT&T, effective tomorrow, March 1st.

If you have any friends who are seeking a new Internet Service Provider, please do tell them about your experience here at Sonic.net. Now 20,000 customers strong, we’re proud to continue to offer stable service and friendly support. New customers can sign up quickly by phone by calling support at 707-547-3400. Don’t forget, we’ve got a referral program that allows you to receive a check for $20 for each friend you refer.

Important details on this program are at: www.sonic.net/sales/referral/

Tue Feb 27 10:06:04 PST 2001 — Denial of service attacks: In the past 24 hours we have been the target of two brief DOS attacks. Both attacks flooded our inbound links and maxed out the CPUs in both of the active core routers. While the attacks were in progress you may have noticed sluggish performance or other connectivity issues. -Nathan, Kelsey, Steve and Scott.

Sat Feb 24 10:42:49 PST 2001 — 707-522-1003 was having problems with authentication this morning, resulting in a ‘Host unreachable’ error when trying to connect. We needed to do an emergency reboot of the gear on that dialup pool. This caused some people to get disconnected. After the reboot the authentication errors went away. -Steve

Fri Feb 23 11:28:22 PST 2001 — We are experiencing capacity issues on our Sebastopol dialup pool. We have ordered additional capacity for this area and it will be available shortly. Meanwhile if you experience busy signals you may want to search our pop finder for a alternate dialup number. Sonic.net has redundant dialup in most coverage areas. You can find the pop finder tool at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl -Steve

Thu Feb 22 11:34:31 PST 2001 — PacBell is continuing to have ongoing problems with their DSLAMS. Right now the DSLAM in Petaluma is offline. This is affecting about 125 customers. We’ve seen roaming outages on DSLAMS in different areas over the past few days. In all cases they’ve come back up in a few hours. -Dave & Kelsey

Thu Feb 22 14:07:56 PST 2001 — Yesterday we had problems with a disk filling on our primary outbound email spooling server. Some outbound email was delayed by as much as six hours due to problems in our notification system. We’ve repaired the notification tools so that we’ll avoid this situation in the future, and we’re looking at architectural changes to allow our five primary email servers to shed their dependence upon the outbound spooler. -Dane, Kelsey and Scott

Wed Feb 21 17:26:09 PST 2001 — We’re seeing an increase in the amount of SPAM being blocked and also being delivered to Sonic.net customers. We are doing many things here to block as much SPAM as we can. We’ll continue to develop additional methods of blocking in an effort to reduce the clutter in your email inbox.

Remember, do not reply to SPAM with remove requests; this just validates you as a responsive target. Instead, report it in order to shut the spammer down at the source. A great resource for automatically filing SPAM reports is SpamCop at www.spamcop.net/. You may additionally bounce or redirect SPAM with full headers to spam@sonic.net; messages received there are reviewed in order to continue to enhance our own blocking and filters.

Sonic.net uses a number of anti-spam efforts currently, including:

Subscription to the Mail Abuse Protection System (MAPS) “Plus” system, including the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), Relay Spam Stopper (RSS) and DialUp List (DUL). For info on MAPS, see www.mail-abuse.org/. The majority of inbound SPAM is blocked by this tool.

Rejection of email from invalid sources. Email coming from domains which are not valid (correction) or which are malformed is rejected. Quite a bit of SPAM is sourced from entirely invalid domains, and is blocked by this filter.

Rejection of email from our own internal blacklist of SPAM source domains (1828 domains) and SPAM source email addresses (2592 addresses). These two lists have been generated primarily from user SPAM redirected to spam@sonic.net or posted in news:sonic.spam-can A rather small amount of spam is blocked by these blacklists, as they spammers have generally moved on to new domains or email addresses with each new wave of emails.

For further discussions about SPAM and anti-SPAM efforts, please read and post to news:sonic.spam-can.d

-Dane

Tue Feb 20 11:06:47 PST 2001 — Congestion avoidance. A colo site had incorrect permissions on some of their directories, which prompted scurrilous ruffians to upload DIVX files for illicit distribution. The resulting demand caused saturation on our T3’s, with as much as 3% packet loss on our Internet circuits. While this does not seriously interfere with ordinary use of TCP/IP, it does cause TCP to enter “congestion avoidance”, which means TCP streams slow down to prevent packet loss. We have corrected the situation; the saturation has stopped, and traffic is now moving normally. Please visit news:sonic.net for questions about congestion avoidance. -Scott, Matt, Rob, and Mike

Tue Feb 20 13:39:26 PST 2001 — Emergency admin server downtime. We had to reboot our core administrative server. This could have resulted in slow DNS response while the server was down but should not have affected other normal Internet usage. Membertools were also unavailable while the host was down. -Scott & Kelsey

Fri Feb 16 02:27:58 PST 2001 — Night Operations: We completed all of the security updates and network maintenance. No significant downtime was incurred. -Kelsey, Scott, Chuck and Matt.