Month: February 2003

Thu Feb 13 16:36:30 PST 2003 — ASI DSL maintenance on VP 103. ASI will be performing maintenance on VP 103 tonight just after midnight. They have found errors on this VP which serves some Oakland DSL customers. Customers on this VP will experience loss of connectivity while the repairs take place but should see an increase in performance after completion.

Please note that all DSL accounts are provisioned with dial-up service as well. Local dial-up numbers can be found at:

www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl

As always, be sure to check with your operator that the number you are dialing is a local one.

-Sonic.net Operations

Wed Feb 12 09:32:53 PST 2003 — Slight instability tonight as networks converge. Between 11pm tonight and 6am tomorrow, there will be two 30-second outages from our fiber carrier to San Jose Equinix. The carrier is moving aerial fiber underground. Most importantly, reachability to one of our transit carriers, Cable & Wireless, will be affected. We will still have connectivity to the Internet with our other transit carrier, UUNet. There may be slight instability as the global routing table figures out how to reach Sonic.net, and Sonic.net routers use alternate routes to some remote sites. We expect nothing but a minor hiccup. -Scott

Wed Feb 12 14:01:13 PST 2003 — Slight instability Thursday night as networks converge. (Fiber maintenance rescheduled.) Between 11pm Thursday and 6am Friday, there will be two 30-second outages from our fiber carrier to San Jose Equinix. The carrier is moving aerial fiber underground. Most importantly, reachability to one of our transit carriers, Cable & Wireless, will be affected. We will still have connectivity to the Internet with our other transit carrier, UUNet. There may be slight instability as the global routing table figures out how to reach Sonic.net, and Sonic.net routers use alternate routes to some remote sites. We expect nothing but a minor hiccup. -Scott

Tue Feb 11 17:29:06 PST 2003 — SR2 POP Upgraded. Our Second dial-up pop in Santa Rosa has been upgraded with dedicated back-haul to our SR HQ datacenter. This should reduce latency at this pop by over 30ms, granting better interactive performance and stability. The SR2 POP handles 522-1001, 522-1002, as well as some currently unlisted numbers. -Nathan and Kelsey

Thu Feb 6 19:35:58 PST 2003 — Customers who have Multilink (dual-B ISDN or “shotgun” dual line dialup) connections who are calling our 9811 dialup during peak hours are sometimes being overflowed into equipment which doesn’t support Multilink.

The second channel in some cases will overflow to another group, and the Multilink can’t be built as the equipment is different (3Com in 9811 and Lucent in 9606). Customers running into this will likely have more luck on our 9606 dialup group, or if you’re local to Santa Rosa or Sebastopol, on the dialups in those cities. Sorry for any odd behavior!

-Dane

Thu Feb 6 18:51:33 PST 2003 — The building adjacent to Sonic.net currently has space available for lease. If proximity to enterprise datacenter colocation space, high bandwidth IP and tons of fiber availability are important to your business, please send me a note at: mailto:dane@sonic.net

The building next door to us at 2250 Apollo way has around 11,000 square feet of space available, which will be built out to suit one or more tenants. It’s subdividable, and can include warehouse space and roll-up door if needed.

Sonic.net has conduit between the buildings, and we are pulling fiber into 2250 so that we can offer the same type of services we offer in our building at 2260 currently. Note that 2260 is at full tenant occupancy at this time, but we’ve got quite a bit of available raised floor datacenter colocation space. The datacenter includes all the features you’d expect such as diesel generator, fire suppression, security and Internet access.

-Dane

Wed Feb 5 12:42:24 PST 2003 — Update on mail server issues: The mail server delay and performance issues have been resolved through customer behavior modification (a handful of users accounted for well over 20% of the total mail server load) and the implementation of traffic shaping in our POP3 server based on the number of messages in a user’s spool. We are continuing to work on our new mail server architecture which will resolve the performance issues while also supporting a number of new features. In the meantime, we’ll continue to take steps as needed to resolve mail server performance issues as they arise. -Kelsey and Nathan

Wed Feb 5 12:34:38 PST 2003 — New NNTP news service online. We’ve brought a third news service online that all of our directly connected customers can access, ‘altnews.sonic.net’. This news service provides unrestricted bandwidth and usage and provides good retention in binary groups. If you are currently using ‘supernews.sonic.net’ you may want to try out the new service. -Kelsey

Tue Feb 4 10:17:29 PST 2003 — SSL server offline again. We have taken the SSL server offline for maintenance. Web mail and customer SSL services will be unavailable while the server is down. SSL services should be restored soon; we will update this MOTD as soon as the maintenance is complete. -Kelsey, Chris

Update: SSL is back online. We replaced a few cables and double checked for any hardware misconfiguration. None was apparent so we’ll be watching the box like hawks. We will replace the hardware as soon as a replacement can be brought in, if it fails again before that, we’ll migrate onto spare hardware. -Kelsey

Tue Feb 4 08:38:06 PST 2003 — SSL server offline. The server which handles webmail and SSL services is having difficulties. We are looking into the problem and will keep you updated. -Matt

Update: Tue Feb 4 09:08:25 PST 2003 — SSL server back online. All webmail and SSL services are functioning again.