Month: April 2005

Fri Apr 29 17:35:19 PDT 2005 — News server disk failure. news.sonic.net has experienced a disk failure and is shut down for emergency maintenance. We’re working to restore the failed volume if possible, but do not have an ETR.

supernews.sonic.net and newscene.sonic.net, our other Usenet news servers, continue to operate normally. All news hierarchies on news.sonic.net (except for sonic.*) are available from either of these servers.

-Nathan and Kelsey

UPDATE – news.sonic.net has lost one disk from it’s binary spools but is otherwise back online and in service. -Kelsey, Eli, Scott, Nathan and Augie

Thu Apr 21 09:55:59 PDT 2005 — Broadlink Outage. Some Broadlink customers began experiencing connectivity problems around 9:40 am. this morning. The issue is being investigated. -Matt and Broadlink

UPDATE – The problem has been traced to Broadlink’s new backhaul equipment. Technicians are on the scene and they hope to have the issue resolved within 1/2 an hour. – Sonic.net and Broadlink Support

Thu Apr 21 14:26:11 PDT 2005 — DSL service interruption in Santa Rosa. We are experiencing a general DSL outage affecting much of the Santa Rosa area. ASI is working on the problem and we hope to have service restored soon. -Sonic.net Support

UPDATE – The DSL service interruption in Santa Rosa is due to emergency maintenance being performed by SBC. They hope to have service restored within an hour. -Sonic.net Support

Wed Apr 20 19:19:34 PDT 2005 — DSL Outage in Santa Rosa. At 5:47pm, ASI reported a general outage in the Santa Rosa area. All circuits on the SNRSCA01BB1 gear are directly affected, though reports of collateral sync-no-surf problems have been reported throughout the area. We have no ETR at this time. -Eli and John F

Update: ASI officially reports that service was successfully restored at 7:00pm. This is consistent with testing from our side at the time. -John F

Mon Apr 11 16:42:59 PDT 2005 — DSL Firewall Features Roll Out Tomorrow. This is a reminder that we will start rolling out the application of the DSL firewall features Tuesday morning, 4/12/05. We will apply them to successive groups of DSL customers at a rate that our technical support folks can manage. Please see Dane’s previous MOTD for details of this new service. -John, Nathan and Kelsey

Sat Apr 2 12:29:02 PST 2005 — BroadLink Scheduled Outage Notification. BroadLink is currently upgrading their wireless network backhaul, which will yield improved performance for wireless connected customers. BroadLink says:

“An important component of our upgrade plans will require a brief planned outage as we swap an old backhaul radio for a faster unit.

We will be making this change on Saturday morning (April 2nd) beginning at 9:00am. As we fine-tune the new system (or in the case of disaster revert to the old hardware) service will fluctuate significantly. The project should be completed by 12:00 Noon.”

While normally, intrusive network maintenance is done at night, tower safety requirements dictate that this work be done during daylight hours. Additionally, while normally upgrades can be built and tested prior to deployment, with the deployment then just being a quick switch-over, the local radio frequency spectrum usage requires that this upgrade be done with the current link offline, as the two would interfere with each other.

I believe that BroadLink provided this notice via email to their customers, but Sonic.net missed getting it into our MOTD a few days ago, when the information was released. I’m sorry about that! -Dane