Author: admin

Mon Sep 16 23:00:04 PDT 2002 — Night Operation – At 1am Tuesday morning we will be integrating a new router into our core. During this configuration we will be moving our Cable & Wireless T3 to the new router. Customers will not experience any service interruption, however, there will be a brief (30 second) period where traffic will slow slightly as our UUNet T3 takes over. This new configuration will complete the First Phase build-out of our new network infrastructure.

Our Santa Rosa routing core will consist of two Cisco 7507’s connecting Santa Rosa to our San Francisco (Focal) POP and our San Jose (Equinix) POP. Splitting our core into two border routers allows for a resilient configuration of our POPs and provides us with the hardware to move to Phase 2.

Phase 2 of our new architecture is the completion of a fiber ring linking our Santa Rosa datacenter, San Jose POP and San Francisco POP. This ring will ride UFO fiber from Santa Rosa to Equinix around the East Bay terminating in San Jose. A link from San Jose (Equinix) to San Francisco (Focal) will swing around the South end of the Bay where it will meet up with our Focal POP. Pac Bell fiber then connects Focal to Santa Rosa on two DS3’s.

This fiber infrastructure and ring topology, in conjunction with redundant routing equipment will provide Sonic.net with a fault tolerant fiber ring with plenty of room for expansion. -Sonic.net Staff

Update – Tue Sep 17 04:36:24 PDT 2002 — Night Ops complete. The Cable & Wireless T3 has been moved and now lives in our second border router.

Mon Sep 16 22:42:42 PDT 2002 — Fast busies on 522-1001. A card in the dial-up gear which serves 707-522-1001 was malfunctioning causing intermittent fast busy signals. The card has been rebooted and is taking calls again. -Matt

Mon Sep 16 04:26:42 PDT 2002 — Night ops complete. A misconfiguration during the operation caused some dial-up customers connected to 707-522-1003 to lose connectivity briefly.

Sun Sep 15 11:45:11 PDT 2002 — SSL and Macintosh w/ IE 5.x. Our SSL server, ssl.sonic.net, was running a new httpsd that didn’t agree with IE 5.x on Macintosh. We have gone back to the old httpsd program. -Scott

Sun Sep 15 09:39:59 PDT 2002 — The Downtown Wireless Network which offers 802.11b wireless access to Sonic.net customers in downtown Santa Rosa will be offline until Tuesday. We are re-engineering our backhaul of the network to our new data center and will be performing software upgrades on the server. -Matt, Nathan and Bryan

Sun Sep 15 15:04:01 PDT 2002 — At 1am on Monday morning we will be performing maintenance on our Cable & Wireless T3. The result will be a brief 30 second period where connectivity will slow as we re-terminate the circuit. During this time, the UUNet T3 will handle all connectivity. Service will not be interrupted. -Matt, Nathan and Kelsey

Wed Sep 11 12:27:03 PDT 2002 — Tonight between 10pm and Midnight, Pac Bell will be performing an intrusive test of the T1 which serves Rooftop customers in the Rohnert Park ‘R’ section. The test will take between 15-45 minutes. During this time Rooftop service will be unavailable in the ‘R’ section. Please note that all Rooftop accounts have dial-up service available for backup connectivity. -Matt

Tue Sep 10 12:52:20 PDT 2002 — We have integrated phpMyAdmin, a MySQL database manager, into our membertools. This allows customers with a MySQL account to manage their databases using an online, easy to use interface. PhypMyAdmin allows users to create, alter and drop tables and fields, import and export database structures, execute custom queries and more. Information about our MySQL service have be found at sonic.net/sales/addon/mysql-info.shtml

We have also added a membertool which can automatically add and remove MySQL services from accounts to simplify the use of this service. Our MySQL service relies on the same redundant NetApp NFS infrastructure that we use to support all of our core ISP services. -Chris B. and Kelsey

Tue Sep 10 12:23:16 PDT 2002 — SpamAssassin has been upgraded to the latest stable version, 2.41. The upgrade should further increase SA’s ability to accurately tag SPAM and adds a number of new user customizable features. The new version of SpamAssassin also adds support for Razor v2 which should provide vastly improved hit rates over v1 because of its support of fuzzy signatures and other new features. For more information on Razor please see razor.sourceforge.net/docs/whatsnew.html and for SpamAssassin please see www.spamassassin.org To learn more about how SpamAssassin works at Sonic.net and for solutions to common problems, please see our local newsgroup news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam

We are recommending that all users that have not already done so enable SpamAssassin on their accounts. Over 1900 of our users are already benefitting from cleaner, nearly SPAM free inboxes. All users, including mailbox and dial-up addon accounts, can access the membertools to enable SpamAssassin and modify their email filtering configuration with the SpamCan tool. -Kelsey

Tue Sep 10 08:30:00 PDT 2002 — Customers dialing into our 707-522-1001 and 707-636-1001 dial-up groups are experiencing problems connecting. We are currently working to resolve the issue.

For a list of alternate numbers in your area, please see our POP finder at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl . -Chris and Matt

Update: The problem was traced to an unknown routing problem between our remote 1001 POP and Sonic’s backbone. While diagnosing the problem, routing converged and the situation cleared up before we could ‘nail’ the issue. Our monitoring package should have alerted us to the problem early this morning, but an obscure problem with that package caused us to learn of the situation late, after 08:00am. We have repaired the paging package, and continue to monitor the 1001 POP for any possible issues – Eli, Matt, OPS Staff