Tue May 14 21:35:27 PDT 2002 — A runaway procmail script caused some mail servers to sporadically refuse SMTP connections. Some customers may have received a “Connection refused” error message while trying to send email. The issue has been resolved.
Sonic.net’s load-balanced array of six mail servers is designed to handle issues such as these. Our mail load is such that we can run on three mail servers and still continue to process mail in a timely fashion. -Matt and Russ
Tue May 14 17:05:25 PDT 2002 — NetApp and Mail problems solved: With the help of NetApp support and one of our users (Thanks Guy!) we were able to track down the reason for the NetApp’s unusual behavior. As it turns out the run-away process did more than we believed at first and it caused us to hit some some limits in the NetApp’s software. We have cleaned up all the damage done by the run-away process and are looking into how to prevent this from happening again. -Kelsey, Nathan and Russ.
Wed May 8 12:01:02 PDT 2002 — Sundry Updates and Fixes: We’ve upgraded our DNS servers to Bind 9.2.1 from 9.2.0. The new version has a number of small fixes and improvements. This was a seamless update, no customer should have noticed the maintenance. Over the past few days we’ve also put a great deal of effort into tuning our NNTP feeder server for optimal performance. In this process we uncovered a few sub-optimal configurations that were causing backlog and poor article completion on our news server. We also upgraded both the server and spam filtering software to the latest stable release. The result of this work is that our news server now has much better multi-part binary completion rates. If you have been using supernews for binary news reading, you may want to try news.sonic.net — it is faster than supernews. -Kelsey
Wed May 8 15:27:18 PDT 2002 — SpamAssassin updates: We’ve just upgraded SpamAssassin to the latest CVS snap release of 2.21. As always, there are new scores and rules which should improve it’s performance. This version also enables the use of the DCC (Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse) which is a network of clients and servers that track checksums related to about 1 million emails per day. These checksums are then used by SA to gauge the ‘bulkiness’ of a message. We’ve had DCC enabled in our SA test environment for a few weeks with excellent results. For more information about the DCC please see www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/ and news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam All Sonic.net accounts, including mailboxes and addon dialups, can turn SpamAssassin on with the SpamCan membertool. -Kelsey
Tue May 7 13:28:18 PDT 2002 — We just finished updating our inbound mail anti-virus filtering to include filtering for the latest group of prevalent Microsoft email client worms, including Klez.E. We’ve seen a steady increase in the volume of email worms passing through our servers and encourage all of our users to install anti virus software on their systems. It is also advisable to make sure that Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express software is up to date by using Windows Update frequently. In many cases, the latest patched releases are not vulnerable to the same exploits that are used by the worms. -Kelsey