Month: September 2010

ATM Customer Aggregation Router Reload

This Tuesday, September 28 at 12:01 AM, we will be performing a maintenance reload on our ATM customer aggregation routers. This will result in 5-10 minutes of downtime for Business-T and FRATM customers.

-Jared

Long sales/support hold times

Today we have been having challenges keeping hold times to reasonable levels. We are suffering with hold times of 15-20 minutes today. I am very sorry for the long wait if you need assistance!

Recently we merged sales and technical support into a single group, so callers reaching out for sales receive the same customer service experience as support. That’s great because sales inquiries reach knowledgeable technical personnel, but when hold times are long it can be frustrating.

The primary call volume has been related to our Fusion product. If you are interested in Fusion, please review the sales material on the website, and keep in mind that signing up online will be the quickest way to have your order processed. It’s not necessary to call us. If you have any questions about the product, you can also write to sales@sonic.net with any questions.

For support issues that do not require an interactive dialog, feel free to email us at support@sonic.net and we will reply as soon as possible.

We have five new call center staff starting next week. Thank you for your patience as we grow!

-Dane

UPS Maintenance and Battery Replacement

On September 28th and 29th one of the UPSes that serves our Santa Rosa datacenter and colo facility will have all of it’s batteries replaced.  (Over 4,000 pounds of them!)  We will also be taking the opportunity to install a battery monitoring system in this, our oldest, UPS.  Once installed, the battery monitoring system will allow us to individually monitor each battery in the UPS allow us to predict pending failure as well as reliably detect other faults.  Service will not be interrupted, this is a fully scripted event coordinated with our vendors.

CLEC Intrusive Maintenance

This evening, at 12:01AM, we will be performing intrusive maintenance work on equipment serving Fusion and FlexLink Ethernet customers in Healdsburg. Affected customers will experience up to 10 minutes of downtime while this work is performed.

-Tim

Customer MySQL server down-time.

We lost connectivity to one of our Customer MySQL servers at approximately 0130 this morning, service was restored at 0213, and we are investigating the cause of the loss of service. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

VPN Concentrator Certificate Update

Today the security certificate used by our VPN concentrator expired, and we have replaced that certificate with a new one. The certificate is used by the Cisco VPN Client to properly secure VPN connections, so clients with the old certificate will no longer be able to connect. You can get the new certificate by installing the latest version of our VPN Client at this URL:

http://sonic.net/support/hotspotportal/

-Jared and Kelsey

UPS Maintenance

Next Tuesday, 9/14, the UPS’s serving our Santa Rosa data center will be be undergoing their semi-annual non-intrusive maintenance and inspection.  This is a fully scripted event coordinated with our service vendors and no interruption of power services should occur.  -Kelsey and Russ

DSL Aggregation Issues

This morning our support group has been tracking an issue that is affecting DSL subscribers connected to one of our DSL aggregation routers. We are investigating possible hardware or physical problems that may be affecting that router.

-Jared

Update: The problem was tracked down to a failing port on one of our ATM switches, which was causing heavy packet loss. We moved our connection off that port and the problem should now be resolved.