Year: 2002

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

Tue Apr 30 15:42:16 PDT 2002 — We have scheduled an upgrade on our Cable and Wireless T3 for tomorrow morning at 6:00am. We will be upgrading our bandwidth from 15 Megabits to 45 Megabits. There should be no interruption of service during this upgrade. -Steve

UPDATE Wed May 1 06:25:18 PDT 2002 : Cable and Wireless T3 upgrade went flawless. No down time was seen, and all looks well. -Steve

Fri Apr 26 11:45:57 PDT 2002 — Upcoming scheduled downtime of domain registration services.

This is a registry imposed maintenance that will affect all ICANN accredited registrars equally. We will be working to minimize the effects of this downtime and will be releasing more information as it becomes available.

This maintenance window is scheduled to begin at 6:00pm on Sunday, 2002-04-08 and is scheduled to last for 12 hours.

-Chuckc

Fri Apr 26 17:30:13 PDT 2002 — We have updated the look and feel of our some of our membertools to make them cleaner and easier to use. Most importantly, we’ve enabled Mailbox and DialUp Add-on account access to the member tools. These accounts can now use the appropriate account management tools, including SpamAssassin. -Kelsey, Nathan, Chris M. and John F.

Thu Apr 25 10:08:40 PDT 2002 — SpamAssassin has been upgraded to the latest stable version, 2.20. There have been a number of small rule set changes, fixes and additions and the rule scoring has been improved as well. This was a seamless upgrade and did not adversely affect any users. For more information about SpamAssassin see www.spamassassin.org and our local AntiSpam newsgroup news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam To turn SpamAssassin on for you account, please see the SpamCan member tool at sonic.sonic.net/membertools/.

Please note that mailbox and dialup add-on accounts cannot access the Member Tools to turn SpamAssassin on at this time. However, our support department can turn on SpamAssassin manually for these users. We are in the final testing phase of a complete rewrite of the tools which will enable mailbox and dialup add-on accounts to access the appropriate tools and expect to have them ready by early next week. -Kelsey

Thu Apr 25 09:00:36 PDT 2002 — WorldCom/UUNet network instabilities. UUNet reports a problem in their global network causing routing instabilities throughout their backbone. This problem is affecting a large part of the Internet in the United States. It will cause intermittent connectivity problems until UUNet is able to resolve the issue. In the mean time, Sonic.net’s redundant backbone Internet connection with Cable & Wireless will continue to serve non-UUNet connected Internet space. -Matt and Steve

Thu Apr 25 16:12:01 PDT 2002 — Sonic.net is proud to announce the addition of the .US top level domain (TLD) to our list of supported domain names.

Real time registrations for this exciting new TLD are being processed now. This new name-space is likely to get crowded, so if you’ve got a good name you are interested in, act quickly to secure it.

Also, to celebrate the release of .US, Sonic.net is offering 2 FREE years of domain registration, a $50.00 value, when you sign up for multihomed website hosting for any newly registered domain. This special offer is available for all .us, .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz domain names.

To secure your .US domain name, visit our domain tool at: sonic.sonic.net/members/domain_tool/

Update: We apologize for mangled MOTD, a software bug caused the format to get destroyed.

Thu Apr 25 15:32:23 PDT 2002 — Mail Authentication Failures: We just had an unusual hiccup with our POP3 servers. Starting at 15:13 for approximately 10 minutes we dropped a large portion of all POP3 connections due to authentication failures. The problem resolved itself before were able to track down the source. We are continuing to track down the cause of the failures so we can prevent it from occurring again. -Kelsey, Nathan, Russ, Matt and Steve