Month: August 2008

New email Member Tools released today

We deployed the email portion of our New Member Tool suite this morning. Significant improvements have been made, particularly in the following tools:

  • Our Spam Filtering Configuration tools have been rewritten from the ground up to be easier and more intuitive to use. They’re available at https://members.sonic.net/email/spam.

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

– Dianne & Kelsey

Web cluster outage

At 12:55PM this afternoon, we experienced an outage of our main web cluster. Customer downtime was under 5 minutes. All services have been restored. –Don

Update: Upon investigation, we have taken steps to increase the robustness of this cluster to ensure this particular problem does not occur again. We apologize for the inconvenience.

BroadLink wireless outage

BroadLink is a wireless carrier partner for a group of customers in Santa Rosa and some surrounding areas.  BroadLink has had a failure of a critical component in the core of their network, and they are currently attempting repair.

We have scheduled a meeting for an hour and a half from now for next status update.  At this point, we have no realistic estimated time to repair to offer for them.

We remain guardedly hopeful that BroadLink will find a way to work around the failed component.  That said, customers for whom DSL is available who wish to transition to DSL can begin that process by contacting Sonic.net sales

Update: A workaround has been devised, and if all goes well, we expect to see BroadLink back online within the hour.

New features added to our DNS Editor tool.

We have added the ability for our customers to edit their Reverse DNS in our DNS Editor Member Tool:

https://members.sonic.net/websites/nameservers/host_records

This tool works for anyone with IP Address services with us; be it Colocation, Leased Server, DSL, or anything else with an IP address tied to it; you can now use this tool to assign the corresponding DNS records to those addresses.

This feature is most useful to those running their own mail servers and can also be of use to those people who want both the forward and reverse of their domain name to match.

Sonic.net Backup Service

Sonic.net would like to invite you to try out our new online backup service. Our online backup service is available for OS X and Windows 2K or greater. It comes with a 50GB quota to backup all of your important documents and pictures.

For helping us test this new service you will receive in addition to the 90 day trial period an extra 90 days of backup service. If you would like to sign up for this service, please email support@sonic.net so we can sign you up!

Massive DDoS Attack

Approx 30 mins ago a Distributed Denial of Service attack was aimed at one of our colo customers. The NOC quickly identified and blocked the DDoS, but the attack ramped up to over 700 Mbps for several minutes. This traffic congested one of our transit links for 5-10 minutes, possibly causing poor performance or loss of connectivity to some sites on the Internet. As we were contacting the congested transit provider to have them put in a block, the DDoS ceased.

Our internal network remains sound, and we are continuing to monitor the network for any further disruptions.

-Jared and Nathan

DSL Subscriber Rebalancing

On Wednesday August 13 at 12:01 AM we will be moving several hundred DSL subscribers from one of our DSL aggregation routers to another, to balance network load. This move should take less than 5 minutes and will only cause a brief service interruption.

-Jared

Update: The migration has been completed. Downtime for most affected customers was less than 5 minutes. However there was a minor mix-up during the migration that caused approx 75 customers to lose connectivity for 15-20 minutes. All problems have been resolved and all customers should have proper connectivty again. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this maintenance.

Sonic.net IMAP Upgraded

Sonic.net System Operations has upgraded our IMAP server software to a version we’ve had in testing. Besides a noticeable speed improvement over the previous version, we have made message Tagging and client message status available!

–Don, Kelsey and the SOC.

Inbound DDoS

We recently experienced an inbound DDoS attack that was directed at one of our customers. The attack was promptly blocked at our edge and any connectivity issues related to it should be resolved. Customers may have experienced slightly degraded performance during this time. -Dusty, Nathan, and Jared