Month: September 2002

Sun Sep 15 15:04:01 PDT 2002 — At 1am on Monday morning we will be performing maintenance on our Cable & Wireless T3. The result will be a brief 30 second period where connectivity will slow as we re-terminate the circuit. During this time, the UUNet T3 will handle all connectivity. Service will not be interrupted. -Matt, Nathan and Kelsey

Wed Sep 11 12:27:03 PDT 2002 — Tonight between 10pm and Midnight, Pac Bell will be performing an intrusive test of the T1 which serves Rooftop customers in the Rohnert Park ‘R’ section. The test will take between 15-45 minutes. During this time Rooftop service will be unavailable in the ‘R’ section. Please note that all Rooftop accounts have dial-up service available for backup connectivity. -Matt

Tue Sep 10 12:52:20 PDT 2002 — We have integrated phpMyAdmin, a MySQL database manager, into our membertools. This allows customers with a MySQL account to manage their databases using an online, easy to use interface. PhypMyAdmin allows users to create, alter and drop tables and fields, import and export database structures, execute custom queries and more. Information about our MySQL service have be found at sonic.net/sales/addon/mysql-info.shtml

We have also added a membertool which can automatically add and remove MySQL services from accounts to simplify the use of this service. Our MySQL service relies on the same redundant NetApp NFS infrastructure that we use to support all of our core ISP services. -Chris B. and Kelsey

Tue Sep 10 12:23:16 PDT 2002 — SpamAssassin has been upgraded to the latest stable version, 2.41. The upgrade should further increase SA’s ability to accurately tag SPAM and adds a number of new user customizable features. The new version of SpamAssassin also adds support for Razor v2 which should provide vastly improved hit rates over v1 because of its support of fuzzy signatures and other new features. For more information on Razor please see razor.sourceforge.net/docs/whatsnew.html and for SpamAssassin please see www.spamassassin.org To learn more about how SpamAssassin works at Sonic.net and for solutions to common problems, please see our local newsgroup news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam

We are recommending that all users that have not already done so enable SpamAssassin on their accounts. Over 1900 of our users are already benefitting from cleaner, nearly SPAM free inboxes. All users, including mailbox and dial-up addon accounts, can access the membertools to enable SpamAssassin and modify their email filtering configuration with the SpamCan tool. -Kelsey

Tue Sep 10 08:30:00 PDT 2002 — Customers dialing into our 707-522-1001 and 707-636-1001 dial-up groups are experiencing problems connecting. We are currently working to resolve the issue.

For a list of alternate numbers in your area, please see our POP finder at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl . -Chris and Matt

Update: The problem was traced to an unknown routing problem between our remote 1001 POP and Sonic’s backbone. While diagnosing the problem, routing converged and the situation cleared up before we could ‘nail’ the issue. Our monitoring package should have alerted us to the problem early this morning, but an obscure problem with that package caused us to learn of the situation late, after 08:00am. We have repaired the paging package, and continue to monitor the 1001 POP for any possible issues – Eli, Matt, OPS Staff

Tue Sep 10 20:16:41 PDT 2002 — The hardware load balancing equipment which serves mail and web services failed this evening and required a reboot. During the 15 minute time the equipment was offline, local web pages and email were unavailable. We are working with the vendor to determine the cause of the problem.

Our new data center and network topology now allows us to introduce a second Alteon load balancer for redundancy. We will expedite integrating the second Alteon into our network which will mitigate the impact of this type of problem in the future.

-Matt, Kelsey, Eli and John F.

Mon Sep 9 18:46:32 PDT 2002 — The T1 which serves Rooftop Customers in Rohnert Park ‘R’ Section is experiencing excessive framing errors and some packet loss. We have a trouble ticket open with Pac Bell and are working to resolve the issue. -Matt