Month: November 2002

Fri Nov 15 18:30:16 PST 2002 — Yet another kernel upgrade. It turns out that Wednesday’s kernel upgrades weren’t enough to combat the kernel bug. A new program was released about an hour ago on Bugtraq that was far more tenacious about killing a server. Fortunately, Linus Torvalds himself posted a kernel patch to the linux-kernel mailing list, which we applied to all vulnerable servers. Those servers are now no longer vulnerable. We don’t expect another problem with this security bug. -Scott

Wed Nov 13 17:19:20 PST 2002 — Kernels upgraded. Today we upgraded operating system kernels on all user-accessible hosts to combat a vulnerability to a Denial of Service attack. An exploit to this attack was posted to Bugtraq in the wee hours of the morning, and by noon, we had all vulnerable systems upgraded. -Scott and Kelsey

Tue Nov 12 20:18:57 PST 2002 — Intermittent busy signals on 1003. We experienced intermittent busy signals briefly on our 1003 dial group. We rebooted the offending PRI card and service has returned to normal. -Matt and Kavan

Tue Nov 12 13:26:09 PST 2002 — Sonic.net is releasing for beta trial our new Pop-Up ad blocker for Windows and Internet Explorer. The software will block annoying Pop-Up ads, as well as optionally block animated gifs and ShockWave Flash animations, which are often used in banner ads.

This is beta software, and if you download and install it, we would appreciate your feedback in the newsgroup news:sonic.net

The URL to download the installer is:

ftp.sonic.net/pub/FreeSurfer21026Sonic.exe

For users of Macintosh or Linux systems, we recommend Mozilla, which offers Pop-Up blocking in it’s configuration options. -Dane

Sat Nov 9 13:06:43 PST 2002 — Miscellaneous Broadlink Problems. Broadlink has had some problems due to the windstorm. They currently have one tower completely down, which they are working to restore. Additionally, Broadlink customers may be impacted due to wind misaligning their antennas. If your Broadlink service has degraded since the windstorm, please email support@sonic.net, or call tech support at 547-3400. -Scott and Dane

Fri Nov 8 14:09:32 PST 2002 — A brief denial of service attack against one of our colocated customers caused some intermittent performance and delays.

We are in communication with the customer, and it’s possible that their machine may be compromised. If the issue occurs again, we can place bandwidth limits on the port to eliminate the possibility that this would impact our uplinks and other customers. -Dane, Kelsey, Matt and Kevan

Thu Nov 7 09:49:26 PST 2002 — Busies on 707-522-1003. We are currently experiencing intermittent busy signals on our 1003 dial-up group and are opening a trouble ticket with Pac Bell. Please remember that we have backup numbers available at: www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl -Matt

Tue Nov 5 10:31:56 PST 2002 — ATM OC-3 upgrade. DSL and some Frame Relay customers will have service briefly interrupted during an upgrade of our ATM circuit from a T3 to an OC-3. This upgrade will increase capacity on our existing link, which is currently experiencing congestion during peak utilization periods.

The migration of customer connections to the new circuit is scheduled to occur between 2am and 5am on Wednesday November 13th.

For daily statistics on the current circuit, see the following URL. Note that the average utilization outbound is about 32 megabits, and it’s peaking at it’s max capacity of 36 megabits.

makeashorterlink.com/?E48B23A52

The new OC-3 circuit is three times as fast as the current T3 and has a raw speed equivalent to 84 T1 circuits (ATM protocol overhead reduces this somewhat). Customers will experience lower latency and higher speeds during peak utilization times subsequent to this upgrade. -Dane

Tue Nov 12 13:26:28 PST 2002: UPDATE. This upgrade has been rescheduled for next Wednesday, as SBC was not ready for the migration as planned. Any orders which were held pending the upgrade are being processed today.

Wed Nov 20 04:14:53 PST 2002: UPDATE. OC3 migration complete. We have successfully migrated off the ATM DS3 and on to the new ATM OC3. This involved moving all FRATM and DSL customers in blocks from one circuit to the other over a period of approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes. This new capacity will eliminate the congestion we were experiencing during peak times. During the migration we also moved an external CSU/DSU chassis which serves Covad, frame-relay, peering and customer T1’s. Pac Bell projected a 3 hour migration, but thanks to Augie at ASI, things went more quickly. -Matt, Zeke and Scott

Tue Nov 5 02:39:01 PST 2002 — Issues with SpamAssassin: There were reports yesterday of email reaching customers’ inboxes without being filtered by our anti-spam tools. We were unable to correlate any of the reported failures to any problem on our servers. We were also misled by the belief that the failures only occurred during a short window when some routine maintenance was being performed on the load balanced spam processing servers. Some users brought additional information to our attention in news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam and we were able to correlate their reported failures with some issues on our end. This intermittent failure only affected customers that were using the old ‘file based’ SpamAssassin and not the new web-based tools. The problem has been resolved and will be investigated further in the morning. -Kelsey

Mon Nov 4 15:14:10 PST 2002 — Squirrelmail. For a few weeks we have had select users beta-testing a new web mail client for us, and reports have been overwhelmingly positive. Today, this new program, Squirrelmail, is replacing TWIG as our default web mail application. You can reach it through the web mail link on the main sonic.net home page, or through www.sonic.net/mail directly. Please note that TWIG will still be available directly through www.sonic.net/twig

Note: Your contacts can be easily imported from TWIG with a single click in the addresses section. Just click the “Import TWIG Contact list” link on the bottom. -Kevan