Month: March 2002

Nokia Rooftop customers in Rohnert Park ‘R’…

Sun Mar 31 10:28:33 PST 2002 — Nokia Rooftop customers in Rohnert Park ‘R’ section are experiencing intermittent problems. The T1 providing backhaul is taking errors and going offline frequently. A trouble ticket has been opened with Pac Bell. No ETR at this time. -Matt

Update: Sun Mar 31 11:41:28 PST 2002 — Pac Bell has completed repair and the circuit is back up. They were not able to give an explanation for the outage. We will be monitoring the link closely throughout the day. -Matt

POP B4 SMTP relay authentication now supports

Wed Mar 27 16:59:41 PST 2002 — POP B4 SMTP relay authentication now supports the use of POP3 and SPOP (SSL encrypted POP3.) Users who are connecting to Sonic.net’s mail servers from off site are encouraged to use SPOP whenever possible to help protect their password and sensitive email.

-Kelsey and Nathan

The sms experienced a “hiccup” at about…

Sun Mar 24 13:29:55 PST 2002 — The sms experienced a “hiccup” at about 1:17pm this afternoon. PacBell DSL and Broadlink customers lost connectivity for about 5 minutes. PacBell DSL customers are now back online, but some Broadlink customers are still experiencing problems. We are working with Broadlink to fix the issue and a trouble ticket will be opened with Redback. Update: Sun Mar 24 14:24:29 PST 2002 — Broadlink service restored. Chris and Shane have restored Broadlink service to the remaining affected customers. All systems are now working properly and we don’t expect further problems.

-Matt, Eli, Chris and Shane

We have added support for SPOP (aka TLS or…

Mon Mar 18 17:42:18 PST 2002 — We have added support for SPOP (aka TLS or POP3s) to our POP3 servers. SPOP encrypts the connection between your email client and the server with the same kind of encryption used more commonly to secure websites. This enables users to securely connect to our POP servers from insecure networks without fear of their password being transmitted in clear text along the wire. SPOP is supported by the majority of popular email clients. We do not recommend that users who are directly connected to our network use SPOP; The overhead of encrypting the traffic causes unnecessary load on both our servers and your client computer. NOTICE: At this time users requiring POP B4 SMTP authentication to relay mail through our servers from off of our network should not use SPOP and should continue to use POP until further notice. We expect to enable the use of SPOP for relay authentication shortly. -Kelsey and Nathan

Last Friday, March 15th, we added an…

Mon Mar 18 17:39:36 PST 2002 — Last Friday, March 15th, we added an additional PM3 to our San Francisco POP and brought another PRI online. This upgrade should resolve any capacity problems with our XXX-9606 numbers served by the San Francisco pop. -Russ

Covad reports: Some services out of Santa…

Thu Mar 14 20:13:35 PST 2002 — Covad reports: Some services out of Santa Rosa, CA (SNRSCA01-SL1) CO are down. Covad tx tech dispatched. If you have a Covad circuit with Sonic.net that is affected by this, please let us know and we’ll keep on top of the repair. -Dane

We’ve found and fixed incorrect permissions…

Thu Mar 14 19:37:12 PST 2002 — We’ve found and fixed incorrect permissions settings on a large number of user’s FTP incoming directories. Setting permissions of read/write/execute on these directories allows pirates to dump stolen software into the directory to be downloaded by others, and is generally a bad thing.

Please set permissions for incoming directories to write/execute only for group and other, eg drwx-wx-wx, or mode 0733. This allows people to upload into the directory so that they can submit files to you, but not to list the contents or download from the directory. 130 directory permissions were fixed. -Dane

Emergency maintenance on our 707-522-1002…

Wed Mar 13 11:17:32 PST 2002 — Emergency maintenance on our 707-522-1002 dialup pool today by PacBell. This was scheduled to be done tonight but PacBell has informed me that they need to do it this afternoon. If you normally dial our 1002 dialup pool, this will cause a 15 to 20 minute outage at 1:00pm today. The 1002 pool should be back up by 1:20pm We apologize for the short notice on this. Thank you. -Steve

We just completed deploying a new Linux…

Wed Mar 13 16:43:28 PST 2002 — We just completed deploying a new Linux kernel on all of our mail servers. The new kernel fixes a small build error that was preventing all of the RAM on our servers with 1GB of RAM and more from being fully utilized.

This morning we also corrected another small build error with our name servers that prevented Bind 9.2.0 from properly multi-threading. The new properly threaded build isn’t faster than the single-threaded build but better utilizes both CPUs in each server, as well as maintaining responsiveness during cache and zone maintenance. -Kelsey and Nathan

We have corrected a small bug in our…

Tue Mar 12 12:53:43 PST 2002 — We have corrected a small bug in our POP-B4-SMTP authentication system that caused occasional failures for mailbox customers sending mail through our SMTP servers from off-site. -Russ and Nathan