Month: October 2002

Thu Oct 31 13:14:49 PST 2002 — SpamAssassin and Graymail updates: We’ve just completed upgrading SpamAssassin to the latest stable release and added a new feature to the GUI. Users can now optionally choose to have our servers dump blacklisted senders so they’ll neither end up in your inbox nor graymail. Please keep in mind that it does no good to blacklist an address that isn’t going to be reused by the sender; most spam has uniquely generated From addresses. We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback for SpamAssassin and over 30% of our members have turned it on. SpamAssassin is now enabled by default for all new accounts. We strongly recommend that anyone who hasn’t enabled SpamAssassin and graymail do so now. You can enable it in the member tools at sonic.sonic.net/membertools/spamcan -Kelsey and Chris B.

Sun Oct 27 09:05:20 PST 2002 — sms reboot. Our sms decided to reboot itself this morning, causing about a 10 minute outage with DSL and FRATM T1’s. When the Redback sms crashed, it wrote a crash dump to a flash card, which is why it took so long to come back up. We will be forwarding the crash dump to Redback for analysis. -Scott and Dane

Fri Oct 25 08:23:51 PDT 2002 — Busies on 9811 dial-up numbers. We are currently experiencing busy signals on our Focal dial-up numbers in San Francisco. We are on the line with Focal and will work to resolve this quickly. Please note, we have other numbers available which can be found at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl -Matt

Update: Fri Oct 25 10:24:53 PDT 2002 — Focal dial-up issue resolved. Focal discovered the problem and we have worked together to resolve this issue. If you have further problems please call Tech Support to troubleshoot.

Wed Oct 23 17:25:50 PDT 2002 — We believe that we have located the cause of the Alteon’s instability and will be reconfiguring it and two of our other switches at 1:00AM tomorrow morning. We don’t believe that it will cause any interruption of service, however, if it does become invasive, the downtime will be very brief. -Kelsey and Nathan

Update: Night Ops completed. We reconfigured the Alteon and the two other switches involved in our server load balancing. We believe this should resolve the ongoing stability issues. Incidentally, while taking the opportunity to continue deploying multicast on our core network, we encountered a software bug in one of our core Cisco 7507 routers causing it to lock up. It continued to forward traffic until we rebooted it, temporarily isolating our San Francisco POP from the rest of our network. This served as an opportunity to test redundancy in our core network; no one, apart from customers connected in San Francisco, would have noticed the event. -Kelsey, Nathan, Zeke and Matt

Wed Oct 23 02:37:33 PDT 2002 — Night Ops Completed: We performed all of the planned maintenance without any customer impact. It appears the Cable and Wireless did not enable multicast routing on our upstream router but multicast is tested and functional within our network as intended. Hopefully they will finish configuring our upstream router quickly so we can offer multicast streams to our DSL customers. -Nathan, Zeke and Kelsey

Wed Oct 23 13:32:34 PDT 2002 — Software issue with Alteon. A failure of the link between our Alteon and switch caused locally hosted web sites and email to be unavailable for 15 minutes. This time, rebooting the Alteon did not fix the issue. We are monitoring the device closely and continuing to work on a long-term redundant solution to avoid these types of problems in the future. -Matt, Kelsey, Eli and Scott

Tue Oct 22 23:29:58 PDT 2002 — Busy signals on 707-823-8812. We discovered that a bad modem card in our Sebastopol dial group was causing fast busy signals during peak calling times. The card has been taken out of service for repair. We will add the new card when call volume is low. Customers should not notice any more problems with this number. -Matt and Russ

Tue Oct 22 20:51:04 PDT 2002 — load balancer hiccuped. Our load balancer for web and mail services stopped functioning momentarily — a fast thwap of the box fixed the problem. -Scott

Tue Oct 22 15:24:17 PDT 2002 — Invoice-to-fax system change. From now on, the invoice-to-fax system will only deliver faxes from 8am-8pm. This should solve the problem with home users getting faxes in the wee hours of the morning. We apologize for that inconvenience. -Scott and Nicki

Tue Oct 22 14:37:31 PDT 2002 — Night Ops: We are going to upgrade part of our core network tonight after Midnight, in order to support multicast to our DSL subscribers. After the maintenance is complete our ADSL users should be able to access multicast streams carried by Cable and Wireless. We will also be re-enabling access to broadband multicast streams from Cidera and ISP TV in the near future. The upgrades should be non customer affecting. -Nathan, Zeke and Kelsey