Month: July 2004

Tue Jul 27 17:30:13 PDT 2004 — Santa Rosa Redback reboot Thursday morning. We are going to reboot the Santa Rosa DSL gateway at 12:30 AM Thursday, July 29. Expected downtime for DSL customers served through this equipment is expected to be 15 minutes. This action is part of our ongoing process to correct some performance problems. -John and Nathan

Tue Jul 27 16:37:50 PDT 2004 — MTA Filter hiccup. We tripped over a bug in our custom MTA level RBL filter application resulting in no MTA level spam filtering when we rerouted list traffic through our MX servers this afternoon. The MTA filters have just been restored and Russ is busy fixing the bug in the software now. Hopefully with the recent SpamAssassin upgrade this failure went largely unnoticed. -Kelsey and Russ

Tue Jul 27 15:12:03 PDT 2004 — List server changes. Our new mailman list server is online and ready for action. Mailman is significantly more user friendly than majordomo and features intuitive web based management of list configuration and subscribers. Inbound list server emails have also been rerouted to pass through our MX cluster to provide spam and anti-virus filtering for lists.

The new list server also signals the discontinuation of support for majordomo. All users with majordomo lists will receive an email with detailed instructions on how to migrate their existing list to the mailman in the next few days. Once the active lists have been migrated our majordomo server, afterburner, which has been in service since April 22, 1997, will be decommissioned.

New mailman lists can be created and managed through the updated list tool in the member tools. For more information please see news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net and mailman.sf.net

-Kevan, Chris B., and Kelsey

Mon Jul 26 13:47:51 PDT 2004 — We’ve upgraded SpamAssassin! The long awaited SpamAssassin upgrade has been completed!

Currently, we are running a 3.0 pre-release version which we will upgrade when 3.0 goes gold. Even this pre-release version has already proven to be more effective at catching the spam that makes it through our suite of MTA level filters.

There are a few important changes that have been made to SpamAssassin and it’s integration into our tools. By default, SpamAssassin now re-encapsulates any tagged messages as an attachment to the spam report. This behavior can be modified with the SA tool in the member tools which has also been updated with a number of new features. In order to maximize the new version’s performance, we’ve reset everyone’s configuration to the new default but have left any whitelists or blacklists alone.

For more information or to report any problems, please see news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam

-Kelsey and Chris B.

Mon Jul 26 13:29:37 PDT 2004 — Sonic.net filters new virus. A new variant of the MyDoom virus started hitting Internet users recently. It harvests email addresses from the victim machine and sends messages that purport to be from the recipient’s Internet Service Provider. Sonic.net is filtering this virus now, so our customers won’t spread the virus. But you may have seen some strange message before the filtering took effect. It is also reported that this virus is causing problems for search engines like Google because it also searches for email addresses matching the domain of an address found on the victim machine.

For more information, see this link: www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.mydoom.m@mm.html

-Sonic.net Support and Operations departments

Fri Jul 23 17:55:31 PDT 2004 — Sonic.net will be closed for our 10th anniversary party, Sunday the 25th of July.

Thanks everyone for a wonderful decade in business! It’s been wonderful and fun for me, Scott and the rest of the team. Thanks very much to the customers, and also to the staff, present and past, for all your support. From the registry:

Domain name: SONIC.NET Record created on 26-Jul-1994.

Technical support will be closed on Sunday July 25th for an all day 10th anniversary staff and family party. I hope this doesn’t present much inconvenience for customers – please call us Monday for assistance, and we’ll be pleased to help.

Thanks, everyone! -Dane Jasper

Fri Jul 23 17:38:19 PDT 2004 — Santa Rosa DSL performance problems. Some of our customers served from our Santa Rosa DSL gateway are seeing performance problems, such as increased packet latency and packet loss. We are collecting as much diagnostic information as possible in order to isolate the cause of the problems.

At this time we believe that there are two separate issues at work. The first is backbone network congestion to some destinations. This problem should be greatly alleviated if not solved as the first major parts of our network rebuild come on-line. A DS3 (45 Mbps) circuit between our two San Francisco POPs will turn up on Monday, relieving some congestion on our Santa Rosa to 200 Paul, SF, link. Then later next week we will be able to take delivery of the gigabit Ethernet circuit that will eliminate that congestion.

The other issue is with performance of the Santa Rosa DSL gateway. Even though we are within published specs, we are seeing certain problems with the ATM port. The manufacturer has recommended that we reduce traffic on it. To that end we are working on acquiring an ATM switch to put in front of the gateway to split the existing traffic onto two separate ports on the gateway. If the manufacturer is correct, this will take care of this issue.

If you are one of the affected customers, we are sorry for the inconvenience. Please know that we take our network performance seriously and are working to take care of these issues as soon as possible. -John, Dane and Network Operations

Thu Jul 22 14:32:10 PDT 2004 — Customer T1 outages in San Francisco. We are experiencing an outage of the facility carrying customer T1 circuits into our San Francisco POP. We expect this to be repaired and back into service by 3pm. -John, Zeke, Jared and Sonic.net Operations

Tue Jul 20 23:21:52 PDT 2004 — Short Stockton DSL outage Wednesday night. The company that hosts our POP in Stockton is doing some work Wed. night, 7/21/04, from 11 pm to 1 am that will cause an outage for our Stockton area DSL customers. The expected downtime is 15 minutes sometime during that period. -John

Mon Jul 19 15:47:14 PDT 2004 — Newscene.com maintenance window. On Thursday, July 22, Newscene.com will be performing maintenance on newscene.sonic.net. Expected downtime is 60 minutes, and the work will start at some time between 11am and 3pm PDT.

This only affects customers with newsreaders that use newscene.sonic.net. -Scott