Month: December 2001

Mon Dec 31 12:53:33 PST 2001 — On December 24th at 3:15pm, freezer, one of our Network Appliance F740 filers failed and icebox, it’s cluster partner, took over its operations. There was no interruption in services during the takeover. This is the first time that we have had an unplanned NetApp cluster failover and it worked flawlessly. Freezer was brought back into service on the 27th after completing diagnostics on the hardware, again with little or no service interruption. We are very pleased with the performance of the NetApp filers and the fact that an otherwise devastating hardware failure went unnoticed by our customers. We were also pleased that we were able to put off fixing the problem until after we had returned from the holidays! -Kelsey, Nathan, Eli and Dane

Mon Dec 31 13:14:37 PST 2001 — Sundry Updates and Changes: We have improved the DOS detection scheme in our POP3 servers to eliminate false positives. In the past, some users may have received an error, “Slow down; you are reconnecting too fast” This primarily effected users behind office firewalls or NAT boxes. If you continue to receive this error, please contact support.

As stated in an earlier MOTD we have migrated archived weblogs to a new directory structure. Archived logs used to be available on the shell and ftp servers at /var/log/httpd/domain.name and are now stored at /var/log/httpd/username/domain.name This completes the final step in the release of our new quota and bandwidth tools and provides extra security since only the owner of an account is able to view the logs for that account. Weblogs for your personal webspace are also archived here as well.

We have worked up a fix for the long standing ‘wavyworld’ problem. User’s personal webspace (sonic.net/~username) is accessible under any domain hosted at sonic.net. Starting Wednesday, access to a ‘~’ URL under a multihomed or parked domain will be restricted to the owner of the domain. Exceptions to this rule can be made by request of the domain owner. Please email support to have exceptions added.

-Kelsey and Nathan

Sat Dec 22 19:46:19 PST 2001 — Microsoft Windows security issue update. Sonic.net has placed filters online which block traffic to ports 1900 and 5000, which the FBI is currently recommending to limit the scope of the current Windows XP security flaw.

As these ports are used for regular traffic as well, this will cause some random failures to establish network connections. We estimate that this will happen in less than one tenth of one percent of attempts. Customers with static IP addresses who need to be exempted from these filters can write to support@sonic.net. -Dane, Eli, Nathan, Kelsey and Russ

Sat Dec 22 16:55:42 PST 2001 — Community.net members on-board at Sonic.net. We have taken on about 2,000 new members of Community.net, which is ceasing operations.

We’d like to welcome these new customers to our own community here at Sonic.net. Thanks very much to David Talley and the staff at Digital America for their endorsement of our service for their customers and their assistance with this transition.

Community.net customers will be able to continue to use their existing email and website addresses, and have been sent further information about this transition. Please direct any discussions on this topic to:

news://news.sonic.net/sonic.general

-Dane, Scott, Eli, Kelsey, Russ, Nathan, Matt, Chuck and the Sonic.net support team

Fri Dec 21 18:44:15 PST 2001 — Microsoft Windows security issue. A major security vulnerability has been announced that affects all MS/Windows XP machines, and which affects Win98/ME machines that have the WinXP ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) package installed.

We’ve noticed a significant slowdown when accessing the Windows Update support site due to load on the remote end, and recommend that customers read up on this latest bug/patch as necessary. News is available at: www.sonic.net/support/security/. -Eli

Fri Dec 21 17:24:27 PST 2001 — We’ve updated our acceptable use policy (AUP). Updates include more information about abuse, SPAM, copyright issues, quotas, support policies and other changes.

Please take a look at the AUP at www.sonic.net/aup/ and let us know if you have any questions or concerns. Please feel free to participate in discussions in the group:

news://news.sonic.net/sonic.general

-Dane, Chris and Staff

Fri Dec 21 13:28:17 PST 2001 — Broadlink has lost power to the Mt. Barham site which serves North Eastern & Eastern Santa Rosa. PG&E scheduled an outage but the site owner failed to inform Broadlink of the down time. This affects approximately 130 customers and the ETR is 3 PM today (PST).

Update: PG&E has restored power to the tower site. BroadLink says sorry about the interruption! -Broadlink and Sonic.net

Thu Dec 20 12:31:23 PST 2001 — We are pleased to announce that OpenSRS will be moving their registry network to a new co-location facility provided by IBM.

To facilitate this move, we will be bringing our domain registration and management tools off-line on Saturday, December 22nd from 2:00am PST to 6:00am PST.

-Chuckc

Thu Dec 20 10:23:05 PST 2001 — Disk Quota Updates: We have implemented incremental billing for Disk Quota usage. Disk usage over base quota is billed at $10 per 80MB in $1 increments for every 8MB. Our bandwidth and disk quota policies have been updated to reflect the recent changes and are available at www.sonic.net/support/docs/quotas.shtml -Kelsey and Nathan

Wed Dec 19 11:58:34 PST 2001 — The OpenSRS system experienced a brief but total system outage today from 09:30-09:40 PST. All systems are now responding normally. OpenSRS has isolated the cause, and made appropriate changes to ensure that this does not happen again. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. -Chuckc