Author: admin

Tue Sep 11 14:20:21 PDT 2001 — In response to the tragedy in New York, Washington DC and Pittsburgh, Sonic.net’s offices will be closing at 3pm today, and technical support will be closing at 6pm. We’d like to allow our staff to return home, and we appreciate your understanding. We would like to extend our condolences to the victims and their families. -Dane and Scott

Mon Sep 10 19:15:48 PDT 2001 — Sonic.net has launched a new domain registration tool, and new lower prices.

The first in a series of newly updated Sonic.net member tools, our domain registration software offers new registration for .com, .net and .org domains. New lower pricing is available – for example, instead of paying $35 per year for a .com name, it’s now only $25. Discounts are offered for multi-year registrations.

Please do take a look at the new tool and let us know what you think. We’ll be updating many of our member tools with new features and a new look and feel, and we appreciate your feedback.

Take a look at the software at the URL:

sonic.sonic.net/members/domain_tool.php

This tool is the first written by our new programmer, Chuck Clayton. It was a pretty large project, so if you like the look and features, email support@sonic.net and let him know! -Dane and Chuck

Mon Sep 10 15:10:33 PDT 2001 — Mailbox.sonic.net has exhibited continuing problems with mailbox corruption due to our procmail spam filters. We have shutdown pop3 services temporarily to fix the corrupt mailboxes and are in the process of upgrading procmail on all of our mail servers to prevent this problem from occurring again. -Russ, Kelsey and Nathan

UPDATE: Procmail has on tsunami has been upgraded to the latest stable release. It appears to be functioning normally. POP3 services have also been restored.

Mon Sep 10 14:34:01 PDT 2001 — Our RedBack SMS 1800 has rebooted and is currently dumping core. The SMS terminates all PacBell and Broadlink DSL as well as FRATM customers. It should be back up and online in a few minutes at which time all DSL service will be restored. -The Sonic Ops Staff

Fri Sep 7 16:53:18 PDT 2001 — Due to an ongoing network attack, we’re blocking inbound POP checking from SplitRock dialup services. If you’re a Sonic.net customer who is using another ISP’s dialup resources, and if those dialup resources are actually provided by SplitRock, you will not be able to check email via POP until SplitRock security completes their work. -Kelsey, Nathan, Eli and Dane

Wed Sep 5 12:12:31 PDT 2001 — Sonic.net is now providing additional simple addresses for websites. All basic Sonic.net accounts include the ability to publish your own home page, and now it’s easier to publish the address for your pages.

Where previously we provided customers with an address with the “tilde” format, (non-working sample below):

www.sonic.net/~username/

We now also provide the following options:

www.sonic.net/users/username/ www.username.home.sonic.net/ www.username.users.sonic.net/ www.username.members.sonic.net/

You can choose to use and publish any of these addresses when you promote your own website; just replace “username” with your own Sonic.net login name.

Of course, for a business, identity is important, and multihomed “Virtual Server” hosting for your own company domain is a great option. For more information on obtaining your own domain and multihomed hosting, please see the sales page at www.sonic.net/sales/. Note also that we’ll be releasing a new domain name registration tool in the next few days, so if you’re interested in that, wait a little to save some money!

-Kelsey and Dane

Wed Sep 5 11:06:55 PDT 2001 — Tsunami slowdown. Our mailbox server tsunami suffered an NFS bottleneck this morning. Ape’s port configuration for tsunami negotiated a 10Mbps connection rather than 100Mbps when tsunami was rebooted last night. This caused some customers to receive errors when checking email. Tsunami is now cruising along at 100Mbps. -Russ, Kelsey, Eli, Dane and Matt

Wed Sep 5 18:06:13 PDT 2001 — We just upgraded Sonic’s web counter to work with the new home page URLs. Users also no longer need to request that we add new domains to the configuration files as this is now handled internally. For information about the web counter or for instructions on how to add one to your home page, take a look at www.sonic.net/faq/web/counter.shtml -Nathan and Kelsey

Wed Sep 5 03:33:33 PDT 2001 — Night Operations Complete: All scheduled upgrades and maintenance has been completed with minimal customer impact. We appear to have restored FC-AL loop integrity on the NetApp filers and have restored full clustering support. Tsunami has been upgraded and is working well on its new hardware. -Nathan and Kelsey

Tue Sep 4 16:33:44 PDT 2001 — Night Operations: Tonight starting at midnight we will be performing some maintenance and upgrades to icebox, one of our NetApp filers, and tsunami, the server which handles mailbox accounts. We will also be upgrading and rebuilding the RAID in gale, our news feeder server. This is not a customer impacting event. Tsunami is getting a new motherboard and more RAM to resolve its ongoing performance issues. After the upgrade is complete, mailbox users should see a significant increase in performance. The upgrade should only take approximately 15 minutes to complete. Icebox is getting a new FC-AL adapter which will hopefully resolve the Fibre Channel Loop problems that we began seeing last week. The new LRC, which we replaced on one of the disk shelves on Saturday did not resolve the trouble. While we are replacing the FC-AL adapter icebox will be shutdown and all web data which it serves will be unavailable. Additionally, our administrative SQL server, which uses icebox for it’s database storage will offline for the duration of the maintenance. We expect that it should take approximately 20 minutes to replace and test the new FC-AL adapter. We will start the maintenance on icebox at 1:00AM. -Kelsey and Nathan