Month: February 2001

Sat Feb 10 17:34:15 PST 2001 — The Redback SMS1800 which serves all Pacific Bell DSL, Broadlink WDSL, and some T1 customers has started exhibiting odd behavior. We have decided to reload the device — this will result in a couple of minutes worth of downtime. -Nathan, Eli and Dusty

Fri Feb 9 06:26:59 PST 2001 — We’re experiencing a denial of service (DOS) attack this AM, starting a bit after 5am. shell.sonic.net seems to be the primary target, and it’s been intermittently unavailable this AM. We’re keeping an eye on things and will report if the situation degrades. -Dane

Fri Feb 8 19:14:27 PST 2001 — The trouble with the 1003 dial group turned out to be a card in nas21 which had failed. It’s been reset, and we will swap it with spare hardware in the AM. All’s well. -Steve, Dane and Eli

Thu Feb 8 18:32:11 PST 2001 — We are experiencing intermittent “all circuits are busy” messages on our 522-1003 dialup group. We are currently working with Pacific Bell to get this issue resolved. -Steve

Wed Feb 7 16:55:31 PST 2001 — Some hours later, we’ve got the errant mail server back online, the others carried the load in the meantime. Early on, we disabled the host that was causing the problem so that it would not affect customers, and we’ve been working since then to isolate the trouble with that host. Kernel instability was initially blamed for the intermittent crashes, but after some hardware shuffling the host appears to be stable and is back online. Our cluster of four redundant mail servers minimizes customer impact, and today at 13:44hrs we simply had the bad luck of losing two at once, which caused temporary problems. No mail was lost during this period. -Eli, Kelsey

Wed Feb 7 13:44:04 PST 2001 — The mail server cluster is currently experiencing instability. This may result in intermittent problems getting to pop.sonic.net and mail.sonic.net – We are working as quickly as possible to resolve this. -Kelsey, Eli

Fri Feb 2 18:11:14 PST 2001 — We’ve been working on load balancing a bit, and this caused a brief pause in Internet traffic a few minutes ago. We’re done for the day, and will be working on this, mostly at night early next week. -Dane and Scott

Fri Feb 2 05:33:47 PST 2001 — Successful Night Operations. This morning we performed maintenance and upgrades on our backbone, as well as increased redundancy on our Internet connectivity. We replaced the fast ethernet card in our SMS 1800, which should improve reliability of the device. We also moved our server load-balancing vlan to a new switch card, which is part of our move to Sonic.net’s new redundant backbone. With time to spare, we moved the Cable & Wireless T3 to a new router, which increases redundancy in our Internet connectivity. Summary of downtime: DSL & ATM T1 customers: 3 minutes. Web and Mail hosting: 5 seconds, with reduced performance for about 30 minutes. Internet connectivity: 2 minutes, with slight disturbances in the force for 11 minutes. -Scott and Kelsey

Fri Feb 2 15:49:55 PST 2001 — January has been a banner month in growth for Sonic.net, and we’re very excited about this launch into 2001. Tech support hold times have been about a minute longer than our usual levels due to the new customer volume, and we’ve hired two new techs in the past month, bringing us up to 37 employees.

Sonic.net will continue to grow our network, customer care and operations staff to accommodate this growth. We’ve got additional dialup capacity in service and on order, and our backbone connection has been expanded recently as well.

A part of this growth has come from the demise of other Internet services, including free service from Costco. Additionally, as part of AT&T’s acquisition of CableOne, all subscribers there will be losing their CableOne access on February 28th.

The major reason that customers select Sonic.net is the recommendations that our customers give them. We’d like to thank you for your ongoing support by offering a referral bonus in the form of a $20 check for each new customer you refer to us. If you know anyone who’s ready to switch Internet services, now is a great time to refer them over to Sonic.net. Restrictions apply, in particular, the customer must provide your login when they sign up for their new account. Please read the details at:

www.sonic.net/sales/referral/

Thank you very much for your ongoing support and referrals!

-Dane, Scott and Eli

Fri Feb 2 14:49:56 PST 2001 — We are working on our T3 load balancing configuration, and we’ve cleared BGP sessions with C&W as part of the process. This is causing some routing instability, which may be noticeable as slight delays, pauses or sluggish Internet performance. Once complete, our fully redundant load balanced configuration will include end to end link redundancy, much as our web and email hosting with load balancing currently does. -Dane and Scott