Month: July 2001

Mon Jul 30 12:49:44 PDT 2001 — More Code Red work. We’ll be running more scans on our networks, and also implementing some firewalling on the dial-up equipment (Not DSL or Dedicated networks) on port 80. – Eli, Kelsey, Steve, ScottR

Sat Jul 28 15:29:21 PDT 2001 — The SMS crashed again at 12:27PM today. It reloaded properly on the older, more stable code. The code that it is currently running does have some known issues but they are far less significant than the issues that we are having with the latest GD release. We will continue to push RedBack to provide better code for us and to improve their software QA. RedBack should have new code some time next week. -Kelsey

Sat Jul 28 01:05:55 PDT 2001 — The SMS crashed again, twice, in rapid succession. It didn’t boot up on the old code as I had hoped, but I’ve confirmed that it will in the event that it reloads itself again. -Kelsey

Fri Jul 27 16:24:53 PDT 2001 — We had an unexpected crash on our RedBack router. This caused some connectivity problems for DSL and Broadlink WDSL customers. We are investigating into why this has happened. -Eli, Matt, Dave, Kelsey, Steve and Russ UPDATE: RedBack reports that this is a known issue and that it should be fixed in the next stable release due out next week. In the meantime we have reconfigured the RedBack SMS to use an older version of code that we’ve already demonstrated to be more stable than the current code running on it. In the event that it fails again it will boot the stable code. -Kelsey and Matt

Fri Jul 27 15:08:16 PDT 2001 — New SPAM Filter: We implemented a new SPAM countermeasure which may result in 30% reduction in inbound SPAM. For more information about this new filter and how to enable it for your email account, please see my post in news:sonic.general entitled ‘new spam filters’. -Kelsey, Russ, Matt and Scott.

Thu Jul 26 08:25:55 PDT 2001 — Happy birthday to Sonic.net! Domain Name: SONIC.NET Record created on 26-Jul-1994.

As we begin our eighth year, I’d like to thank our customers and our staff for their ongoing support and contributions. We’re now serving about 20,000 users, and have 45 employees. Sonic.net hosts 5000 websites, and over 2500 of our customers have PacBell DSL or BroadLink wireless broadband connections. Over a thousand customers are served by T1 or T3 dedicated circuits that Sonic.net provides to their employers. Sonic.net was listed this year in the Press Democrat’s “Sonoma County 200” business listing of top revenue producers in the county.

Over the years, our customers have always had very nice things to say about the care they receive from our staff here. For this, Scott and I would like to thank all of the people who work hard here to resolve problems, communicate with customers, build and maintain systems and software and manage and sell accounts.

As we continue to grow, we hear on an ongoing basis from our new members that they received numerous recommendations from existing customers for our services. We appreciate your support very much, and we will continue to strive to deliver a valuable and reliable service that you’ll be proud to recommend and to use.

Dane Jasper, Co-founder and CEO Scott Doty, Co-founder and CTO

Wed Jul 25 20:26:43 PDT 2001 — Another unexpected Redback Router crash, which affected PacBell ADSL and Broadlink WDSL customers between 8:09pm and 8:20pm. This appears to be the same ‘crash’ that affected us on Jul. 10th, that being a known bug in Redback’s current ‘General Deployment’ release of the router’s software. There are no known workarounds at this time, but the Sonic.net Operations team will be pressing Redback’s Support more vigorously in an effort to prevent downtime of this kind. – Eli, Kelsey

Wed Jul 25 16:04:30 PDT 2001 — Code Red audit – Yesterday afternoon, Sonic.net pro-actively audited our co-located customers’ networks, and our DSL-connected networks. The software connected to customer machines on port 80, and retrieved the Web Server software version they were running. We discovered 25 servers that were vulnerable to the Code Red worm, and notified the server administrators. – Eli, ScottR

Mon Jul 23 11:12:02 PDT 2001 — “SirCam” Virus outbreak. Yet another nasty virus is in the wild that spreads itself via MS Outlook & Outlook Express. The virus may do a number of very bad things to an infected system, including emailing random documents to every one in your address book, using up all of the free space on your hard disk, or possibly even deleting all of your files. There is more information on this virus at news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6625286.html

We are filtering the SirCam virus based on a number of unique strings that always appear in an infected email. -Kelsey

Thu Jul 19 17:30:29 PDT 2001 — “Code Red” worm foiled. The “Code Red” worm was supposed to flood www.whitehouse.gov at 5pm PDT. Sonic.net staff was standing by waiting for any sign of trouble — and encountered a non-event. It turns out that, to foil the worm, www.whitehouse.gov’s IP address was changed, and some backbone providers filtered the old IP address at their borders. (A traceroute showed the old address being blocked at the other end of our UUNet T3.) Since the worm couldn’t contact the web site, the denial of service attack never happened. Meanwhile, an analysis of our web logs showed that three Sonic.net customers were infected with the worm, who we are in the process of contacting. -Scott, Kelsey, Eli