Author: admin

Thu Feb 6 18:51:33 PST 2003 — The building adjacent to Sonic.net currently has space available for lease. If proximity to enterprise datacenter colocation space, high bandwidth IP and tons of fiber availability are important to your business, please send me a note at: mailto:dane@sonic.net

The building next door to us at 2250 Apollo way has around 11,000 square feet of space available, which will be built out to suit one or more tenants. It’s subdividable, and can include warehouse space and roll-up door if needed.

Sonic.net has conduit between the buildings, and we are pulling fiber into 2250 so that we can offer the same type of services we offer in our building at 2260 currently. Note that 2260 is at full tenant occupancy at this time, but we’ve got quite a bit of available raised floor datacenter colocation space. The datacenter includes all the features you’d expect such as diesel generator, fire suppression, security and Internet access.

-Dane

Wed Feb 5 12:42:24 PST 2003 — Update on mail server issues: The mail server delay and performance issues have been resolved through customer behavior modification (a handful of users accounted for well over 20% of the total mail server load) and the implementation of traffic shaping in our POP3 server based on the number of messages in a user’s spool. We are continuing to work on our new mail server architecture which will resolve the performance issues while also supporting a number of new features. In the meantime, we’ll continue to take steps as needed to resolve mail server performance issues as they arise. -Kelsey and Nathan

Wed Feb 5 12:34:38 PST 2003 — New NNTP news service online. We’ve brought a third news service online that all of our directly connected customers can access, ‘altnews.sonic.net’. This news service provides unrestricted bandwidth and usage and provides good retention in binary groups. If you are currently using ‘supernews.sonic.net’ you may want to try out the new service. -Kelsey

Tue Feb 4 10:17:29 PST 2003 — SSL server offline again. We have taken the SSL server offline for maintenance. Web mail and customer SSL services will be unavailable while the server is down. SSL services should be restored soon; we will update this MOTD as soon as the maintenance is complete. -Kelsey, Chris

Update: SSL is back online. We replaced a few cables and double checked for any hardware misconfiguration. None was apparent so we’ll be watching the box like hawks. We will replace the hardware as soon as a replacement can be brought in, if it fails again before that, we’ll migrate onto spare hardware. -Kelsey

Tue Feb 4 08:38:06 PST 2003 — SSL server offline. The server which handles webmail and SSL services is having difficulties. We are looking into the problem and will keep you updated. -Matt

Update: Tue Feb 4 09:08:25 PST 2003 — SSL server back online. All webmail and SSL services are functioning again.

Tue Feb 4 20:32:30 PST 2003 — SSL Woes Continue: Our new server, which is running a completely fresh installation of linux and a different kernel, is exhibiting stability problems and is currently down. This is the second time that the new box has locked up. We hope to have service restored in about 30 minutes. -Kelsey and Nathan

Update: It’s 23:32 and we’ve swapped SSL onto yet more new hardware. It has been stable for the past few hours under EXTREME load testing. We’ll continue to keep a close eye on it. -Kelsey

Tue Feb 4 14:18:19 PST 2003 — The SSL server has had a disk failure. We are making repairs and restoring data from our backups. Because of the nature of the problem it may take a couple of hours to repair it. Web mail and SSL services will remain unavailable while this operation is taking place. We apologize for the inconvenience and we will update this MOTD as soon as service is restored. -Operations

Update: SSL has been restored from tape onto a new server and has been up for a little more than an hour. We believe that we’ve got the server functioning properly. If you have ssl service, please review your site to make sure it is functioning properly. If you have any questions or comments, please contact support. It took us approximately 90 minutes to restore most SSL services from complete hardware failure. In the process, SSL also got a needed upgrade, it’s now a dual XEON with 2gb of RAM. -Kelsey and Nathan

Tue Jan 28 12:13:22 PST 2003 — Mail Server Backlog: Our mail servers are currently experiencing a high load and are deep in queue. No mail has or will be lost, however, it may be delayed. We have taken some stop-gap measures to try to improve performance and it appears to be helping the situation. We expect to have it cleared up shortly.

We are in the process of testing a new mail server architecture that will resolve these periodic loading issues. We’ve got six blazing fast dual Xeon servers with plenty of RAM, local RAID, dual gigabit Ethernet NICs and two new shelves for our NetApp cluster currently testing the new architecture. The new architecture will include a new locally customized message store format that should provide better end-user performance while also putting less load on the back-end. There is a thread in news://news.sonic.net/sonic.general titled ‘Upcoming changes to mail handling…’ that details the changes and how they should improve the situation. -Kelsey

Mon Jan 27 18:09:18 PST 2003 — BroadLink has made an upgrade to the backhaul radio that serves some Santa Rosa customers – more speed, less latency. Nice work, guys! Please direct discussions to:

news://news.sonic.net/sonic.dsl

-Dane

Mon Jan 27 17:03:11 PST 2003 — Sonic.net CEO Dane Jasper will be on KSRO AM 1350 at a bit after 5:30 PM today on the Pat Thurston show to talk about the SQL Slammer worm. Tune in!