Month: November 2002

Mon Nov 25 12:19:44 PST 2002 — “Friend Greeting” Trojan/virus spreading again. A company called “Permissioned Media”, apparently in Panama, is sending bogus greeting card emails which invite Internet users to come pick up a message from a friend.

The card is actually a software program, which the Internet user is asked to approve installation of. The license agreement, which also must be accepted, allows the software to automatically send a similar greeting to everyone in your Outlook address book.

For more information, see: vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_99799.htm

Sonic.net is working to block emails of this nature, as well as access to the site where the Trojan is picked up. -Dane

Mon Nov 25 13:49:21 PST 2002 — Denial of service attack. Sonic.net’s mail servers are currently under attack from spammers. A spam run is being mounted from multiple IP addresses which is aggressive enough that it is causing our mail servers to have intermittent authentication problems as they attempt to keep up with the increased load. We are working on blocking the spammers and on identifying them if possible. -Russ, Scott, John, Eli, Matt and the rest of the Ops team

Update, Mon Nov 25 15:29:00 2002: We have successfully blocked 90% of the incoming problem traffic, and the situation has been under control for about 45 minutes. The addl. load caused our Spam processing servers to become unavailable for some time, so some spam mail made it through the Spamassassin filters during the attack. We continue to monitor the situation. – Ops.

Fri Nov 22 17:54:06 PST 2002 — Sonic.net is offering a promotion on new orders for SBC-ASI DSL service. This promotion begins at 5pm on Friday November 22nd and ends when we run out of free equipment, so order ASAP if you’re interested.

www.sonic.net/sales/dsl/pacbell/

We’re now offering free refurbished DSL equipment while supplies last, a free self-installation kit, free activation, yup, it’s all free. Some restrictions apply (you have to keep the service for 12 months), offer void where prohibited, your actual mileage may vary, etc. =)

We are also introducing a new entry level DSL product at a total delivered price point of $49.95 monthly, just $31.00 more than a basic Sonic.net account. This is the lowest monthly price for DSL that we have ever offered!

Also new are a “plus” product which offers a higher upload speed, and a symmetric speed product. Here are the new product tiers and price points. Note that these prices are “total delivered monthly cost”, and include the $18.95 basic Internet service fee that you pay currently. For example, the Basic product is actually $18.95 for Sonic.net and $39 for SBC-ASI pass-through billing, for the total of $57.95.

Primary 192-384kbps/128kbps $49.95/mo 4 IPs Basic 384kbps-1.5Mbps/128kbps $57.95/mo 4 IPs Basic+ 768kbps-1.5Mbps/256kbps $69.85/mo 8 IPs Symmetric 384kbps/384kbps $149.95/mo 8 IPs Enhanced 1.5Mbps-6.0Mbps/384kbps $197.95/mo 8 IPs Enhanced Routed 1.5Mbps-6.0Mbps/384kbps $297.95/mo 32 IPs

With the exception of Enhanced Routed, free equipment is included while supplies last. A one year term commitment is required if you take advantage of the free equipment offer – this isn’t required if you supply your own compatible gear.

Let us know if you have any questions – email support@sonic.net. Place your order at:

www.sonic.net/sales/dsl/pacbell/

Sonic.net hosts a local discussion group for questions and answers about DSL. You can find information and discussion about sharing DSL with multiple computers in your home or office, or ask questions about the service and read user feedback. To access the newsgroup, see the following URL:

news://news.sonic.net/sonic.dsl

Wed Nov 20 08:53:31 PST 2002 — We are seeing some DSL customer outages in the higher PVC ranges, in the wake of our OC3 work early this morning. This only affects a small part of our DSL customer base. Our operations staff is working on the problem and we will update via the MOTD when we have more information. – Chris, Matt, Kelsey UPDATE: We are still working hard to restore service to all of our DSL customers. We believe that we have identified the source of the problem and are in the process of acquiring what is needed to resolve the issue. At this time we do not have an accurate ETR. -Kelsey, Nathan, John, Matt and Eli.

Wed Nov 20 13:58:42 PST 2002 — All DSL customers back on-line. During the migration, we reached a maximum customer limit on our interface card which quietly stopped binding customers. The last 25 VP’s on the circuit were moved from the old circuit but not put into service by the router, causing approximately 261 customers to be left without connectivity. After further investigation, it was determined that our vendor shipped us the incorrect card type which couldn’t handle our configuration in its current form. A new card is being shipped, but in the mean time we have modified our configuration to work with the older card.

At this time, we believe that all DSL service has been restored. If you experience problems, please try power cycling your DSL bridge. If the problem persists, please notify technical support at 707-547-3400. -Sonic.net Operations Staff

Mon Nov 18 23:24:51 PST 2002 — SMS Reboot. The router which terminates DSL customers rebooted again this evening around 11:25pm. We will be upgrading the IOS when we bring up the OC3 on Wednesday morning which should resolve this issue. -Matt

Mon Nov 18 21:53:20 PST 2002 — CSU/DSU relocation. We will be relocating our external T1 CSU/DSU equipment on Wednesday between 1am and 3am during the ATM OC3 turn-up. This equipment serves Covad and fractional frame-relay customers as well as our ATG peering circuits. We expect less than 5 minutes of service interruption for those customers while we re-rack the equipment. -Matt

Sat Nov 16 10:11:20 PST 2002 — SMS Reboot. Yesterday, at around 12:30pm, the router that handles DSL spontaneously rebooted. This has happened in the past, and we are already working with Redback to fix the problem. We apologize for not entering this in the MOTD earlier. -Sonic.net

Fri Nov 15 11:30:10 PST 2002 — Mail Server Issues: Our mail server cluster experienced a brief failure this morning. We had a cascading failure which started in one of the SpamAssassin boxes and then led to failures on the mail server cluster, and then the other SpamAssassin box followed suit. During this time, most email handled by our system was unaffected, however some mail may have bounced and pop sessions may have failed to complete properly. At this time all services have been returned to normal.

We are in the process of re-architecting our mail server cluster and are addressing this problem, and others, as we design the new system. Once completed, these kind of failures will hopefully be a thing of the past. -Kelsey and Scott

Fri Nov 15 10:01:33 PST 2002 — BIND vulnerabilities. The Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) implements a DNS nameserver, and is the most popular name server on the planet. Sonic.net uses multiple versions of BIND to support name services. The Internet Software Consortium has just disclosed multiple vulnerabilities in multiple versions of BIND. For those of you running BIND, patches are available here:

www.isc.org/products/BIND/patches/

Sonic.net was on an early distribution list for the patches, which were received 10:30pm Tuesday night, and were applied and running by 11:30pm Tuesday night. Thus, Sonic.net’s vulnerable BIND installations have been secured for over two days already. -Scott and Kelsey