Month: March 2002

Tue Mar 12 11:34:14 PST 2002 — Sundry Upgrades: We have been working hard on a series of key upgrades to improve the performance of our network and servers over the past few months. Due to our use of server load balancing, none of these upgrades caused any interruption of services to our customers.

We are in the process of replacing our slower mail servers with dual 1Ghz PIII’s and have already replaced two of the six, and have plans to upgrade two more shortly. The new servers are many times faster than the old ones, and can handle more intensive and intelligent spam and anti-virus filtering as well as providing better responsiveness to our customers while sending and receiving mail.

We have replaced marine.sonic.net, our old out-bound qmail server, with a group of faster load balanced qmail servers. This upgrade increases the speed at which we can deliver mail destined for other networks and gives us redundancy where we used to have a single point of failure.

We are in the process of adding SPOP (or POP3S) support to our POP3 server. This protocol encrypts POP3 traffic with the same type of key used to secure SSL/HTTPS web sites and allows for users to securely connect to our POP3 server from insecure networks. SPOP is supported by most of the common mail clients for Windows, Mac and Unix. Clients which do not support SPOP directly can use a helper application to connect via SPOP.

We also upgraded our three main DNS servers. First we upgraded their hardware so they are now all dual PIII’s with 1GB of RAM and then recently upgraded the name server software – Bind – to version 9.2.0. Our name servers are blazingly fast now and Bind 9.2.0 is proving to be less problematic for us than Bind 9.1.3. -Kelsey and Nathan

Mon Mar 11 14:15:48 PST 2002 — Server pool upgraded to use SYN cookies. Both our mail servers and web servers have been upgraded to resist a kind of attack called “SYN floods.” This is an attack where the attacker tries to open hundreds, if not thousands, of connections to our servers, which can result in denial of service. Following some anti-spam actions, we have seen an increase in these types of attacks on our web servers — apparently, we’ve ticked off some spammers who are now trying to “make us pay.” They will not succeed. -Kelsey, Nathan, and Scott

Fri Mar 8 14:59:37 PST 2002 — We found a routing error which affected the 522-1001 modem pool. The error was corrected and all is working well now. Thanks -Steve

Thu Mar 7 16:47:03 PST 2002 — This morning we put filtering in place for the W32.Gibe@mm Internet worm and removed more than 100 copies of it from our users’ mail spools. This new worm poses as a security report direct from Microsoft with the subject ‘Internet Security Update’ and contains the body:

Microsoft Customer, this is the latest version of security update, the update which eliminates all known security vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer and MS Outlook/Express as well as six new vulnerabilities

For more information on this new Trojan worm please see securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.gibe@mm.html As always, the Sonic.net staff urges all of our customers to install and run anti-virus software and to be cautious of any unexpected email containing attachments. -Kelsey, Russ and Dane

Wed Mar 6 16:56:53 PST 2002 — Web Server Updates: We’ve just completed an update to the latest versions of Apache and PHP. This was in response the the recent exploits announced in all versions of PHP. We also took the opportunity to add support for the GD image library and True-Type font support to PHP to allow users to take advantage of dynamic image creation and manipulation. -Nathan and Kelsey

Wed Mar 6 16:22:13 PST 2002 — We have just brought more capacity online for the 9811 hunt group, this will help with the capacity issue we were seeing in this hunt group. -Steve

Mon Mar 4 12:51:08 PST 2002 — SpamAssassin, one of our optional SPAM filters, has been upgraded to version 2.11. This new version has improved rules and score sets that should further reduce both false positives and false negatives as well as a completely reworked AutoWhitelist. The new AutoWhitelist uses the average score from a sender to shift the scores on mails by the sender. If the sender sends generally low scoring email, his or her emails will be scored lower- if higher, higher. This new AutoWhitelist should be more effective than the old one and prevents the problem where a spammer could get whitelisted automatically.

There are over 450 users currently using SpamAssassin and we’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback. You can turn SpamAssassin on with the ‘SpamCan’ tool in the membertools. For more information please see news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam and www.spamassassin.org -Kelsey

Sun Mar 3 13:50:20 PST 2002 — ASI is experiencing trouble with DSL in the 408 and 415 area codes. They are working hard on the problem, as several ISP’s are affected. -John, Dane, and Scott

Sat Mar 2 09:03:43 PST 2002 — We’ve replaced failed fans in a number of Sun Cobalt dedicated servers for customers. Downtime was about 10 minutes each as we cycled through the systems that had failed fans.

This maintenance is part of the ongoing support included in the turn-key Cobalt product, and is one of the advantages of the managed hardware platform. If you’re interested in a Cobalt server of your own, please take a look at www.sonic.net/sales/cobalt/ -Dane and Matt

Sat Mar 2 09:00:18 PST 2002 — The news server drive upgrade did not got well. Downtime was about two hours, instead of the planned 25 minutes. Subsequent to the installation of the new 75 gig disk, the server exhibited an issue where it would reboot without cause periodically. Removing the disk from the system did not clear the issue, and we’re not confident that it’s truly resolved. We’ll work on a new approach and revisit this shortly. The planned upgrade will increase our news storage volume by about 20%. -Dane, Eli and Zeke