Author: admin

Fri Mar 3 17:32:30 PST 2001 — Night Operations: Sunday morning at 12:30 am Sonic.net will be performing a number of maintenance upgrades designed to increase NetApp filer, news server and core switching performance as well as border router redundancy. All upgrades are preventative and will further increase the redundancy and responsiveness of Sonic.net.

The news server Typhoon will undergo a performance upgrade during which time news.sonic.net will be offline. The outage is expected to last approximately 30 minutes.

An upgrade of our core switch OS will cause a network freeze that will last about 90 seconds while the switch reboots. The new OS has bug and performance fixes.

We will be bringing up yet another Cisco 7200 router as part of our ongoing efforts toward more redundant Internet connectivity. This will leave us with two edge routers, each handling a T3 to a major Internet backbone. This change will cause loss of Internet connectivity for about three minutes.

The NetApp NFS filer will undergo an OS upgrade and disk firmware upgrade. The process should take less than 20 minutes.

A number of Port Masters servicing 707-522-1002 and some Oakland numbers will be rebooted. There will not be any noticeable down time, however, dial-up connections on the equipment will terminated. While systems are offline, some re-cabling will take place to tidy up the rapidly expanding colocation areas. -Matt, Kelsey, Scott, Steve and Russ

Fri Mar 2 12:09:03 PST 2001 — Sonic.net has completed its California rollout! New equipment is online to provide dial-up access to the remainder of California. This means that local dial-up is available almost anywhere in the state. Additional dial-up numbers have been added to the POP Finder located at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl

Over the next few days, Sonic.net welcomes customers to participate in the public beta testing of these numbers. Remember that Sonic.net is not responsible for long distance telephone charges. Check with your operator to make sure that any number you dial is a local one. -Matt and the Sonic.net team

Thu Mar 1 10:46:35 PST 2001 — We replaced thunder, one of the load balanced web servers with new, much faster, hardware, effectively doubling the capacity of our web server group. The primary effect of this upgrade is increased responsiveness and faster cgi execution on all of our hosted websites. We also updated and patched the latest version of sendmail, our SMTP server software, to enable connection limiting on a per peer basis. We added this feature in response to one of the DOS attacks that happened in mid February to prevent a single rogue server from consuming all of our mailservers’ resources. We’ve submitted this patch to the sendmail maintainers so other sendmail users will be able to benefit from our work. -Kelsey, Nathan & Russ

Wed Feb 28 11:54:52 PST 2001 — Sonic.net is growing quickly, taking on many new customers from Metro.net and CableOne.net’s shutdown. Metro.net’s closure was covered in today’s Press Democrat, the story is at: www.pressdemocrat.com/business/news/28metronet_e1.html

We have one correction to the article – Sonic.net was not founded at the same time as Metro.net (1995), but was founded a year earlier, in 1994.

CableOne.net is ending Internet service as part of it’s acquisition by AT&T, effective tomorrow, March 1st.

If you have any friends who are seeking a new Internet Service Provider, please do tell them about your experience here at Sonic.net. Now 20,000 customers strong, we’re proud to continue to offer stable service and friendly support. New customers can sign up quickly by phone by calling support at 707-547-3400. Don’t forget, we’ve got a referral program that allows you to receive a check for $20 for each friend you refer.

Important details on this program are at: www.sonic.net/sales/referral/

Tue Feb 27 10:06:04 PST 2001 — Denial of service attacks: In the past 24 hours we have been the target of two brief DOS attacks. Both attacks flooded our inbound links and maxed out the CPUs in both of the active core routers. While the attacks were in progress you may have noticed sluggish performance or other connectivity issues. -Nathan, Kelsey, Steve and Scott.

Sat Feb 24 10:42:49 PST 2001 — 707-522-1003 was having problems with authentication this morning, resulting in a ‘Host unreachable’ error when trying to connect. We needed to do an emergency reboot of the gear on that dialup pool. This caused some people to get disconnected. After the reboot the authentication errors went away. -Steve

Fri Feb 23 11:28:22 PST 2001 — We are experiencing capacity issues on our Sebastopol dialup pool. We have ordered additional capacity for this area and it will be available shortly. Meanwhile if you experience busy signals you may want to search our pop finder for a alternate dialup number. Sonic.net has redundant dialup in most coverage areas. You can find the pop finder tool at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl -Steve

Thu Feb 22 11:34:31 PST 2001 — PacBell is continuing to have ongoing problems with their DSLAMS. Right now the DSLAM in Petaluma is offline. This is affecting about 125 customers. We’ve seen roaming outages on DSLAMS in different areas over the past few days. In all cases they’ve come back up in a few hours. -Dave & Kelsey

Thu Feb 22 14:07:56 PST 2001 — Yesterday we had problems with a disk filling on our primary outbound email spooling server. Some outbound email was delayed by as much as six hours due to problems in our notification system. We’ve repaired the notification tools so that we’ll avoid this situation in the future, and we’re looking at architectural changes to allow our five primary email servers to shed their dependence upon the outbound spooler. -Dane, Kelsey and Scott

Wed Feb 21 17:26:09 PST 2001 — We’re seeing an increase in the amount of SPAM being blocked and also being delivered to Sonic.net customers. We are doing many things here to block as much SPAM as we can. We’ll continue to develop additional methods of blocking in an effort to reduce the clutter in your email inbox.

Remember, do not reply to SPAM with remove requests; this just validates you as a responsive target. Instead, report it in order to shut the spammer down at the source. A great resource for automatically filing SPAM reports is SpamCop at www.spamcop.net/. You may additionally bounce or redirect SPAM with full headers to spam@sonic.net; messages received there are reviewed in order to continue to enhance our own blocking and filters.

Sonic.net uses a number of anti-spam efforts currently, including:

Subscription to the Mail Abuse Protection System (MAPS) “Plus” system, including the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL), Relay Spam Stopper (RSS) and DialUp List (DUL). For info on MAPS, see www.mail-abuse.org/. The majority of inbound SPAM is blocked by this tool.

Rejection of email from invalid sources. Email coming from domains which are not valid (correction) or which are malformed is rejected. Quite a bit of SPAM is sourced from entirely invalid domains, and is blocked by this filter.

Rejection of email from our own internal blacklist of SPAM source domains (1828 domains) and SPAM source email addresses (2592 addresses). These two lists have been generated primarily from user SPAM redirected to spam@sonic.net or posted in news:sonic.spam-can A rather small amount of spam is blocked by these blacklists, as they spammers have generally moved on to new domains or email addresses with each new wave of emails.

For further discussions about SPAM and anti-SPAM efforts, please read and post to news:sonic.spam-can.d

-Dane