Month: October 2001

Wed Oct 31 11:14:52 PST 2001 — We will be upgrading firmware on our primary core switch at 1AM Thursday morning. Downtime is expected to be two to three minutes while the switch reboots after the upgrade. The bug fixes in this release should resolve some of the instability that we’ve seen in the product which have caused downtime in the past. We’ll also be bringing our redundant management switch module back online for full “brain” redundancy in this switch.

Our huge Extreme Networks Black Diamond 6808 switch is the primary core switch here at Sonic.net, and much of our network is served by it. A redundant Extreme Networks switch serves one of the two primary Cisco 7206VXR routers, and parts of the network will be reachable during the upgrade, including T3 and some T1 customers. -Dane and Kelsey

Wed Oct 31 17:07:18 PST 2001 — Our October domain registration special expires tonight, so if you’re interested in securing a domain name under the special pricing, see the tools at:

sonic.sonic.net/members/domain_tool/

-Chuck and Dane

Tue Oct 30 09:39:14 PST 2001 — shell.sonic.net has been moved to our new shell server, newbolt.sonic.net. bolt.sonic.net points toward this system now as well, but please always use shell.sonic.net as the primary name for shell service.

The old shell server was halted last night at 12:30AM after we discovered that the ssh host key had changed, implying that the system may have been broken into. It’s been quarantined for forensic analysis, after which we’ll have a better idea of what occurred.

The new shell server is a massive system with dual Pentium III 1 Ghz CPUs, almost a gigabyte of RAM and fast new drives. If you have any software requests or discussions, please post to: news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net

Currently, ssh access to the shell server is available, but telnet and rlogin are currently locked. We expect to turn on rlogin access from our dialup terminal servers in the next hour or so. Telnet access will be turned on shortly, but we’re likely to eliminate it in the next few days in favor of ssh, at least from outside our local network. If you don’t currently have an ssh client such as putty or terraterm, now would be a good time to seek one out and install it.

Update: rlogin access (including shell dialup) is still in the works. We’re having some trouble integrating it into our authentication system. Shell dialup should be available in an hour or two.

Update: rlogin access from our dialup servers (dialup directly to shell) is available. -Dane, Kelsey, Eli, Scott and Steve

Tue Oct 30 00:47:42 PST 2001 — We have shutdown bolt.sonic.net due to some possible security concerns. Our new shell server, newbolt.sonic.net is fully operational at this time so please use it instead. Direct-dial shell accounts are disabled and will be reactivated in the morning. -Kelsey, Eli and Scott

Mon Oct 29 12:02:42 PST 2001 — With the shift to standard time, Sonic.net has moved our administrative office hours to 8am to 5pm PST.

Technical support continues to be available from 8am to 9pm weekdays, and 9am to 9pm on weekends. Support can process new user sign-ups, renewal payments and most other functions for our customers. -Dane, Jen and Eli

Fri Oct 26 15:46:01 PDT 2001 — An issue with our phone system was causing some of our tech support numbers to report that they were disconnected between the hours of 6:00pm and 9:00am. We had a phone tech come out and take a look at our system and he fixed the problem. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused. -Steve and Jared G.

Sun Oct 21 20:46:17 PDT 2001 — We’ve been having some intermittent failures this afternoon of the connection between all of our PacWest xxx-0174 dialup numbers, which are terminated in Oakland and our main datacenter in Santa Rosa. We’re working now to diagnose the cause of the trouble and resolve it.

Meanwhile, our innovative double-pop architecture provides redundant dialup numbers for virtually every community. Local numbers can be found by selecting “Find Dialups” on our home page. We suggest you print the list for future reference in case of problems with the primary number you use. -Dane, Scott, Eli, Steve and Kavan

Update, Mon Oct 22 00:05:25 PDT 2001, Pacific Bell reports that they’ve got two OC-48 circuits (capable of carrying 64,512 voice calls, or 2688 T1 circuits, roughly) between Santa Rosa and Oakland that are taking a lot of errors. They have been working on this issue all day today, and the Pacific Bell network operations center describes this as their top priority. They have not yet found the fault, and do not have an estimated time of repair.

It’s now past midnight, utilization is very low, and we are providing backup numbers for virtually all locations via our “double-pop” configuration. The failure is intermittent, and connectivity is good most of the time. Use the “Find Dialups” tool from the home page to look for backup numbers for your area. We will keep you posted here when Pacific Bell wraps up repair. -Dane Update, Tue Oct 23 09:33:46 PDT 2001, Pacific Bell reports that the cut fiber has been repaired and all is well. The repair was completed around 6:30am on Monday morning.

Sat Oct 20 10:37:41 PDT 2001 — Currently, Sonic.net’s credit card transaction processing is unavailable. This prevents payment of renewals, new sign-ups, domain registrations, etc. We expect to have this resolved shortly, please try again later. -Dane

Update: Transaction processing is back online.

Fri Oct 19 08:26:11 PDT 2001 — We’ve got new quota monitoring tools online in the “Member Tools” area. Users over or projected to be over quota have received warning emails with a link to the tools. If you’re curious about your disk or bandwidth usage, see the member tools at:

sonic.sonic.net/

-Nathan, Kelsey and Dane

Wed Oct 17 11:23:39 PDT 2001 — During the last couple of days we had to take down some of the capacity from our 522-1003 dialup pool and move it to the focal hunt group, this was a temporary measure which may have caused some intermittent busy signals when calling 1003. The capacity has been returned to the 1003 group, so the busy signals should be gone now. -Steve