Month: July 2005

Fri Jul 29 15:48:37 PDT 2005 — Dialup Hardware Upgrades. On Monday, 8/1, at 10 AM, we will be upgrading the hardware that serves the dialup phone numbers ending in -9606. A few customers may have to reconnect after the upgrade occurs. -Russ, Nathan and John

Thu Jul 28 11:26:07 PDT 2005 — Broadlink Firewalling. After a number of delays we have applied firewalling to all Broadlink DSL subscribers. The same firewalls for SBC DSL subscribers are available to all Broadlink subscribers but any change to the firewalling configuration must be executed manually by a support. Again, there are three firewall rulesets:

Option One: Complete Inbound TCP Firewalling. This firewall rule set prevents any inbound TCP connections from being established, protecting your system from most types of Internet attacks.

Option Two (the default, recommended by Sonic.net): Common Exploitable Port Firewalling. This is the default firewall rule set applied to DSL circuits. It blocks traffic on port 25 (SMTP email) both to and from a customers circuit to any mail servers other than Sonic.net maintained servers as well as preventing communication on ports used by common Microsoft services that are frequently exploited.

Option Three: Port 25 Firewalling. This firewall rule set only restricts traffic on port 25 (SMTP email) to and from a customers circuit to any mail servers other than sonic.net maintained servers. This is the minimum recommended rule set. This rule set generally prevents your computer from being hijacked and used to send SPAM directly to other mail servers.

Additionally, users may request to have all firewalling disabled.

-Kelsey and Nathan

Wed Jul 27 12:46:04 PDT 2005 — Broadlink termination gear upgrade. We will be upgrading the firmware on the termination hardware that serves Broadlink customers at 12:01am on 7/28/05. This preventative maintenance will ensure continued stability for Broadlink customers. Customers will experience approximately 20 minutes worth of downtime while the upgrade proceeds. -Nathan and Broadlink

Mon Jul 25 16:22:18 PDT 2005 — Due to our upgrades away from multiple T3 backbone connections and over to Gigabit links, we currently have excess capacity on our redundant fiber SONET ring. This ring leaves our building at two points, and follows separate routes to the Santa Rosa and Rohnert Park wire centers.

To fill this capacity, for the next 60 days we are offering local businesses a limited number of full 45Mbps T3 circuits at a very deeply discounted price point of $3,995 per month. This is a full T3 including local loop, IP transit and a managed Cisco router. Only six circuits will be sold at this price, which is much less than any competitive T3 product. For full details, please see our T3 Special page at the following URL or call us at 707-522-1000 and ask for dedicated circuit sales.

www.sonic.net/sales/eic/t3_promo_2005.shtml

For more info and photos of the fiber installation of our Gigabit Ethernet links, see www.sonic.net/whatsnew/gigaman/.

-Dane, Matt and Alice

Sun Jul 24 10:40:35 PDT 2005 — Sonic.net support will be closed today from 11AM until 5PM for our company picnic and 11th anniversary celebration. We’re sorry for any inconvenience, and we will be back on duty from 5PM on this evening, and will respond to voicemail and email then. -Dane and crew

Wed Jul 20 17:03:26 PDT 2005 — In our ongoing quest to improve the quality and the reliability of the services we provide, we have deployed three new non-recursive geographically diverse name servers in Santa Rosa, San Francisco and New York. All sonic.net zones have been running off of these new servers for a few days now and we have started to update customer zones. We will automatically update the registration records for all domains registered with us while customers using other registrars will be contacted with additional information and instructions shortly. -Kelsey, Nathan and Jared.

Thu Jul 14 10:50:28 PDT 2005 — BroadLink again appears to be having some instability in their network, and they are currently working to ascertain what’s going wrong. At this point, an estimated time to repair is not available. -Dane

Update, Thu Jul 14 12:43:30, BroadLink reports that their network difficulties have been resolved. -Dane (for Jason)

Thu Jul 14 15:59:22 PDT 2005 — BroadLink serving equipment upgrade. Tonight at midnight, we will be upgrading the equipment that connects Sonic.net with BroadLink. Expected downtime is about fifteen minutes.

Update: Never mind. We’re short some parts – we’ll need to reschedule this upgrade.

Thu Jul 14 15:34:00 PDT 2005 — Non-service-affecting network maintenance. We will be replacing failed hardware on one of our core switches at 12:01 AM Friday. We do not anticipate any downtime as part of this maintenance. -Jared and Nathan

Mon Jul 11 15:25:36 PDT 2005 — Widespread Broadlink Wireless DSL outage. At this time most Broadlink Wireless customers are offline. Broadlink is working hard to restore service from this interruption, and expect to have the network up and working soon. -Tim from Broadlink, and Kavan