Month: June 2008

Sonic.net releases a few good Blogs.

For the last few weeks we here at Sonic.net have been working on setting up a few new Blogs to increase transparency into our company and keep our customers and the public at large more informed about our latest developments.

These Blogs are:

The Sonic.net CEO Blog – http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/ : Postings from Dane Jasper our CEO.

The Sonic.net Insider Blog – http://corp.sonic.net/insider/ : The inside scoop on the goings on at Sonic.net.

The Sonic.net Internals Blog – http://corp.sonic.net/internals/ : The technical internal workings of Sonic.net; a blog for System and Network Admins.

The Sonic.net Status Blog – http://corp.sonic.net/status/ : Messages on the current status of Sonic.net’s systems and equipment.

For ease of use you can see the latest content from all these Blogs aggregated at http://corp.sonic.net/blogs/ with links at the top of the page to the other Blogs; clicking on the title of a post will take you to the original posting where you can then leave a comment if you like.

It is our hope that these efforts along with other efforts will increase the communication and transparency we have with our customers and that that improved communication will improve the experience that our customers have with Sonic.net.

Non-Intrusive GigaMAN Maintenance

Tonight between 8 PM and 12 AM we will be performing maintenanance with AT&T on our GigaMAN from our Santa Rosa datacenter to our San Francisco POP. All traffic has been removed from this link, onto the other side of our redundant ring, so there should be no customer impact.

-Jared and Nathan

Update: Due to complications with AT&T we have pushed this maintenance to tomorrow (June 24) from 8 PM to 12 AM.

Early AM Customer SQL Connectivity

Early this morning PDT, during routine maintenance, our Customer SQL server exhibited problems with our replication setup that required immediate action to ensure the integrity of our customer backups that we have here. During this time, you may have seen connection errors as the connections were refused as the problem was being resolved. The issue was fixed, bringing the system back online taking connections as normal.

Update to our Web Mail Service.

We have updated our Web Mail software at https://webmail.sonic.net/atmail/ to the latest vendor release.

This release addresses many of the concerns our customers had with the previous release and adds a few new features; most important of which is full support for the latest release of the Firefox browser (Firefox 3).

If you have not tried our Web Mail software, please do give it a try and send feedback to support@sonic.net. The software offers three interfaces (Advanced, Simple and Basic) which allows our customers to choose the right Web Mail experience for themselves. If you have a mobile phone with web capabilities, you can visit http://m.sonic.net/ for email access from your mobile phone.

New Member Tools available today

We have deployed about half of our New Member Tool suite this
morning. Our new system has been designed from the ground up to
be easier and more intuitive to use.

The new tools available include the following:

  • Account (includes billing, quotas, password changing, etc.)
  • Databases (add, remove, administer)
  • Servers (for users with colos or leased 1Us only)

This is in addition to the Host Records and MX Tools that had been
previously deployed.

The URL for the new tools is http://members.sonic.net/.

Not all users will have access to all tools – for instance, users
with mailbox accounts cannot create databases and so that option
will not be visible to them.

Please check it out and let us know what you think! Feedback can
be sent to members@sonic.net.

— Dianne, Chris, Craig and Kelsey

Connectivity issues on DSL Gateway 3

Due to a hardware failure, DSL customers on DSL GW3 are presently offline. Our NOC is enacting a repair and full connectivity should be restored in approximately 20 minutes.
-Matt, Nathan, Jared and the NOC

UPDATE: Service should now be fully restored to all customers affected by this outage. If you are still having connectivity issues please contact Sonic.net tech support.

Authoriative Name Servers now with IPv6 support!

a.auth-ns.sonic.net and b.auth-ns.sonic.net are now fully IPv6 enabled for answering authoritative DNS requests over IPv6. While IPv6 is still a long way off from widespread deployment we are seeing more and more services becoming available via IPv6.

Sonic.net has provided IPv6 tunnel services to all broadband connected customers since April of 2003. For more information check out http://sonic.net/features/ipv6 or head straight to our membertools to setup your tunnel today.

Comcast connectivity troubles

We are receiving reports from mutual Comcast and Sonic.net customers about difficulty reaching our network from the Comcast network. We are investigating the issue now from our side to see if there is anything we can do to work around the situation. If you are a Comcast customer having trouble, please do open a ticket with Comcast support.

Denial of service attack.

One of our DSL customers in San Francisco was the target of a denial of service attack. We have blocked the offending traffic and all services are operating normally. Customers who shared the DSL termination hardware with the targeted customer might have seen 10 or 15 minutes of spotty Internet connectivity. -Nathan and Jared