Month: April 2003

Tue Apr 29 11:09:57 PDT 2003 — We have reenabled SMTPAUTH on mail.sonic.net. If you are having trouble that you believe is related to SMTPAUTH and need assistance, please do not hesitate to call Tech Support. Local Tech Support numbers can be found at www.sonic.net/support/focal/. -Kelsey and Eli

Tue Apr 29 21:28:53 PDT 2003 — Router line card reboot. A parity error caused a line card in one of our border routers to reboot. This resulted in sluggish connectivity for about 3 minutes. We are monitoring the router closely tonight and are investigating what caused the error. -Matt and Nathan

Tue Apr 29 19:24:52 PDT 2003 — altnews.sonic.net, one of the three news servers that we provide for our customers, was offline for the past few hours. The provider that we contract with to provide this service reports that a failed system disk was the cause of the trouble and that service has just been restored. news.sonic.net and supernews.sonic.net were available during this time. -Kelsey

Fri Apr 25 17:18:10 PDT 2003 — Due to unforeseen incompatibilities and bugs with older Netscape mail clients we are turning off SMTPAUTH support for the weekend. We will be turning SMTPAUTH back on on Tuesday morning. We recommend that users of Netscape 4.8 and earlier versions either upgrade to the latest version of Netscape (7.x) or switch to another email client, like Outlook Express or Eudora, both of which are capable of importing settings and mail from Netscape Mail. It is possible to fix SMTPAUTH in Netscape Mail, the fix for which is given below.

The latest versions of Netscape are available at www.netscape.com/browsers

Eudora is available at www.eudora.com/email

Instructions for editing Netscape’s preferences will be available here shortly: www.sonic.net/support/netscape_prefs.shtml

-Kelsey, Nathan, Russ, Chris, Eli and all of Technical Support.

Thu Apr 24 14:43:24 PDT 2003 — Mail Server Issues and Upgrades: We enabled SMTP-AUTH on our mail server cluster early this afternoon. This should have been seamless, but was not due to a small misconfiguration on some of the servers in the cluster. SMTP-AUTH enables users to authenticate themselves so they may send mail through our servers when connected to remote networks. We have supported this through POP before SMTP, where the POP authentication information is passed along to sendmail. SMTP-AUTH is more reliable and POP-B4-SMTP will not be supported by the new mail cluster. This is just one of a few changes that we have been making to our existing cluster over the past few weeks to facilitate migration to the new cluster.

After the upgrade, we noted that Netscape mail clients attempt to authenticate if the server supports SMTP-AUTH. The misconfiguration caused the authentication to fail on some of the hosts preventing Netscape users from being able to send mail even if authentication wasn’t required to send the mail. If Netscape is not configured with a SMTP server username it will prompt the user to update their preferences. -Kelsey, Russ, John, Eli, Chris, etc.

Tue Apr 15 21:35:30 PDT 2003 — Router reboot. The router which serves 522-1001 and 522-1002 rebooted this evening at 9:27pm. It was offline for about 3 minutes while it loaded. During this time, customers connected to those dial-up numbers lost connectivity. Service has been restored and we are looking for an explanation for the event. -Matt and Nathan

Mon Apr 14 20:55:50 PDT 2003 — Busies on 522-1001 and 1002: One of the USR TC hubs that handles these lines is having trouble on three of it’s PRIs. (Each PRI handles 23 modems.) And is returning occasional fast-busies despite excess capacity. We’re working with ATG to see if they can identify the fault from their side. We already marked these lines out-of-service but apparently calls are still getting routed to them. -Kelsey and Russ

Sun Apr 13 02:02:35 PDT 2003 — Night Ops Complete: All work went as planned. We have replaced the AD3 with one of the ones from the new AD3 cluster earmarked for the new mail cluster. So far it appears to be functioning perfectly. Apparently the old AD3 was suffering from a hardware failure; one which none of the Nortel support reps we’ve talked to have ever seen or heard of. We will be keeping a close eye on the new box; we were able to ‘fix’ the old AD3 a number of times only to have it fail again one week or even a month later. Recent experience aside, the Alteon AD3 has been a very reliable and trusted component of our network. -Kelsey and Nathan

Sat Apr 12 13:16:03 PDT 2003 — Night Ops: Sunday, at 12:00AM, we are going to replace the AD3 that is currently having trouble with another AD3 that is currently deployed in an Active-Standby cluster with a partner for the new mail server cluster. We’ve been reluctant to swap hardware until we had discussed the situation with Nortel who now owns the Alteon product line. Any downtime experienced during the swap to the new AD3 should be less then the periodic outages that we are currently seeing.

We are also taking this opportunity to reboot our Netapp NFS cluster in order to fix a minor annoyance that needs a reboot to clear. They should be down for no more than a few minutes. At the same time the NetApps are being rebooted we will also be swapping the shell server’s disk back into its own chassis to free up the spare server for some other tasks. -Kelsey and Nathan