Tue May 21 09:44:13 PDT 2002 — BroadLink outage. BroadLink is experiencing a network wide outage. They are working to have their network back up as soon as possible. Every Sonic.net account comes with backup dialup server. To find a local dialup number for your area you can visit the sonic.net pop finder tool at:
We will keep you informed as to the status of this outage via the MOTD. – Sonic.net Staff
Thu May 16 09:54:42 PDT 2002 — Our domain registration and transfer tools will be taken off line for a registry imposed maintenance window.
Date: Saturday, May 18th Time: 6:00pm to 10:00pm
This maintenance window has been set by the gTLD registry operator and will affect all ICANN accredited registrars equally. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.
-Chuckc
Tue May 14 12:30:22 PDT 2002 — NetApp problems: At around 8:00AM this morning a run-away process filled the mail spool partition. Some cruft was cleared and additional space was allocated to the mail spool after the problem was brought to our attention. However, this has not resolved the problems with the mail spool directory. At this point, although there is plenty of space available, the NetApp is returning ‘No Space Available’ when a process tries to create a file name of greater than 16 characters. Files with names shorter than 8 characters can be created just fine. This is only affecting the mail quota tree on the NetApp, and not the home or ftp trees. We’ve been working with NetApp for the past few hours providing their engineers with proper debugging output and at this point we are waiting to hear back from them.
At this time, we are accepting and delivering inbound mail and users should be able to read and send their email normally. However, some shell based mail applications are reporting errors that they are unable to create lock files. Using the shell based email clients at this time could potentially cause some mailbox corruption, but it is highly unlikely to occur. -Kelsey, Nathan and Matt.
UPDATE: We are still waiting to hear back from NetApp on the analysis of our debugging output. We are reluctant to take any action without NetApp approval. Mail delivery is slowed down at this time but no email has been, or will be, lost.
UPDATE: We think we might have solved the problem but are running some tests to confirm that everything is back to normal.
Tue May 14 21:35:27 PDT 2002 — A runaway procmail script caused some mail servers to sporadically refuse SMTP connections. Some customers may have received a “Connection refused” error message while trying to send email. The issue has been resolved.
Sonic.net’s load-balanced array of six mail servers is designed to handle issues such as these. Our mail load is such that we can run on three mail servers and still continue to process mail in a timely fashion. -Matt and Russ
Tue May 14 17:05:25 PDT 2002 — NetApp and Mail problems solved: With the help of NetApp support and one of our users (Thanks Guy!) we were able to track down the reason for the NetApp’s unusual behavior. As it turns out the run-away process did more than we believed at first and it caused us to hit some some limits in the NetApp’s software. We have cleaned up all the damage done by the run-away process and are looking into how to prevent this from happening again. -Kelsey, Nathan and Russ.
Wed May 8 12:01:02 PDT 2002 — Sundry Updates and Fixes: We’ve upgraded our DNS servers to Bind 9.2.1 from 9.2.0. The new version has a number of small fixes and improvements. This was a seamless update, no customer should have noticed the maintenance. Over the past few days we’ve also put a great deal of effort into tuning our NNTP feeder server for optimal performance. In this process we uncovered a few sub-optimal configurations that were causing backlog and poor article completion on our news server. We also upgraded both the server and spam filtering software to the latest stable release. The result of this work is that our news server now has much better multi-part binary completion rates. If you have been using supernews for binary news reading, you may want to try news.sonic.net — it is faster than supernews. -Kelsey
Wed May 8 15:27:18 PDT 2002 — SpamAssassin updates: We’ve just upgraded SpamAssassin to the latest CVS snap release of 2.21. As always, there are new scores and rules which should improve it’s performance. This version also enables the use of the DCC (Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse) which is a network of clients and servers that track checksums related to about 1 million emails per day. These checksums are then used by SA to gauge the ‘bulkiness’ of a message. We’ve had DCC enabled in our SA test environment for a few weeks with excellent results. For more information about the DCC please see www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/ and news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam All Sonic.net accounts, including mailboxes and addon dialups, can turn SpamAssassin on with the SpamCan membertool. -Kelsey
Tue May 7 13:28:18 PDT 2002 — We just finished updating our inbound mail anti-virus filtering to include filtering for the latest group of prevalent Microsoft email client worms, including Klez.E. We’ve seen a steady increase in the volume of email worms passing through our servers and encourage all of our users to install anti virus software on their systems. It is also advisable to make sure that Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express software is up to date by using Windows Update frequently. In many cases, the latest patched releases are not vulnerable to the same exploits that are used by the worms. -Kelsey
Tue Apr 30 15:42:16 PDT 2002 — We have scheduled an upgrade on our Cable and Wireless T3 for tomorrow morning at 6:00am. We will be upgrading our bandwidth from 15 Megabits to 45 Megabits. There should be no interruption of service during this upgrade. -Steve
UPDATE Wed May 1 06:25:18 PDT 2002 : Cable and Wireless T3 upgrade went flawless. No down time was seen, and all looks well. -Steve
Fri Apr 26 11:45:57 PDT 2002 — Upcoming scheduled downtime of domain registration services.
This is a registry imposed maintenance that will affect all ICANN accredited registrars equally. We will be working to minimize the effects of this downtime and will be releasing more information as it becomes available.
This maintenance window is scheduled to begin at 6:00pm on Sunday, 2002-04-08 and is scheduled to last for 12 hours.
-Chuckc