Month: May 2004

News Server Outage.

Sat May 15 09:50:42 PDT 2004 — News Server Outage. newscene.sonic.net, one of the three NNRP servers that our customers have access to is currently offline due to a ‘catastrophic hardware failure on a router’ at their San Jose location where we peer with them. They estimated as much as 24 hours would be needed to acquire replacements to restore services at 4:00AM. In the meantime, both news.sonic.net and supernews.sonic.net are still available. -Kelsey

Security upgrade to FTP servers.

Tue May 11 11:15:55 PDT 2004 — Security upgrade to FTP servers. We have made several minor updates to our FTP server config to increase security. If you have any problems on our FTP servers, please contact Support. -Jared

Webmail Imap situation.

Wed May 5 09:23:15 PDT 2004 — Webmail Imap situation. Our imap servers, that run for webmail, maxed out the total number of processes allowed for imap which caused webmail to stop functioning. The max number of processes has been increased to handle the load of our new webmail servers. -Kelsey and Geoff

New load balanced webmail servers.

Tue May 4 15:59:27 PDT 2004 — New load balanced webmail servers. We recently deployed a set of new webmail servers, for increased reliability and performance. Any old bookmarked addresses may cease to function in a few weeks, so please update any bookmarks as necessary to the new system at www.sonic.net/mail

In addition our old deprecated webmail system, TWIG, will cease to function shortly. Please upgrade to Squirrelmail at www.sonic.net/mail as soon as possible if you use this system. Addresses can be imported from TWIG through the address section of Squirrelmail to make this change as smooth as possible. -Geoff and Kevan

Authentication Server Hiccup.

Tue May 4 15:25:44 PDT 2004 — Authentication Server Hiccup. Our authentication servers briefly failed all authentication attempts due to a corrupted automatic configuration update. We are tracking down the cause of the corruption so we can resolve whatever issues may have caused it. -Kelsey and Russ

Sasser and Gaobot on the loose.

Mon May 3 09:52:32 PDT 2004 — Sasser and Gaobot on the loose. Over the weekend, two new viruses have been infecting numerous hosts on the Internet. They exploit vulnerabilities in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP. Other systems should be unaffected. Symptoms of infection include severe degradation of computer performance and error messages regarding “isass.exe” or “lsass.exe”. Four variants of the Sasser worm have appeared since it was first detected late last week.

Removal resources can be found at the following URLs: sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sasser.worm.html www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.gaobot.afw.html vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

As always, Sonic.net highly recommends running Windows Update frequently on any Microsoft Windows systems. — John F and the tech support group

DSL maintenance complete.

Mon May 3 00:46:24 PDT 2004 — DSL maintenance complete. The scheduled circuit upgrade is complete, and all DSL customers out of our San Francisco 200 Paul POP are up on the new OC3. Actual downtime was between 10 and 30 minutes. We also used the maintenance window to upgrade the software on the San Francisco DSL concentrator. -Nathan and John