Author: admin

Fri Feb 2 05:33:47 PST 2001 — Successful Night Operations. This morning we performed maintenance and upgrades on our backbone, as well as increased redundancy on our Internet connectivity. We replaced the fast ethernet card in our SMS 1800, which should improve reliability of the device. We also moved our server load-balancing vlan to a new switch card, which is part of our move to Sonic.net’s new redundant backbone. With time to spare, we moved the Cable & Wireless T3 to a new router, which increases redundancy in our Internet connectivity. Summary of downtime: DSL & ATM T1 customers: 3 minutes. Web and Mail hosting: 5 seconds, with reduced performance for about 30 minutes. Internet connectivity: 2 minutes, with slight disturbances in the force for 11 minutes. -Scott and Kelsey

Fri Feb 2 15:49:55 PST 2001 — January has been a banner month in growth for Sonic.net, and we’re very excited about this launch into 2001. Tech support hold times have been about a minute longer than our usual levels due to the new customer volume, and we’ve hired two new techs in the past month, bringing us up to 37 employees.

Sonic.net will continue to grow our network, customer care and operations staff to accommodate this growth. We’ve got additional dialup capacity in service and on order, and our backbone connection has been expanded recently as well.

A part of this growth has come from the demise of other Internet services, including free service from Costco. Additionally, as part of AT&T’s acquisition of CableOne, all subscribers there will be losing their CableOne access on February 28th.

The major reason that customers select Sonic.net is the recommendations that our customers give them. We’d like to thank you for your ongoing support by offering a referral bonus in the form of a $20 check for each new customer you refer to us. If you know anyone who’s ready to switch Internet services, now is a great time to refer them over to Sonic.net. Restrictions apply, in particular, the customer must provide your login when they sign up for their new account. Please read the details at:

www.sonic.net/sales/referral/

Thank you very much for your ongoing support and referrals!

-Dane, Scott and Eli

Fri Feb 2 14:49:56 PST 2001 — We are working on our T3 load balancing configuration, and we’ve cleared BGP sessions with C&W as part of the process. This is causing some routing instability, which may be noticeable as slight delays, pauses or sluggish Internet performance. Once complete, our fully redundant load balanced configuration will include end to end link redundancy, much as our web and email hosting with load balancing currently does. -Dane and Scott

Thu Feb 1 11:15:04 PST 2001 — Night Operations. Tonight at 2am we will be performing maintenance and upgrades on our backbone. This will affect DSL customers and ATM T1 customers. We also _might_ have the same problem we had yesterday afternoon when moving an etherchannel interface, but think that we have worked out the problems with that operation. Downtime should be less than 10 minutes for the SMS 1800 maintenance and upgrade; and less than a second for the etherchannel move — if the load balancing switch doesn’t require a reset. If Piggy does require a reset, downtime could be as much as a minute for load-balanced redundant services, such as email and web. -Scott and Kelsey

Thu Feb 1 16:32:13 PST 2001 — Covad scheduled maintenance. On Tuesday February 6th between 2 and 4 AM PST, Covad will be doing card upgrades in their San Francisco facility. End users served from this facility (which includes virtually all Sonic.net Covad customers) will be subject to a brief outage during this maintenance. -Dane and Covad support

Wed Jan 31 16:57:20 PST 2001 — Hiccup with load balancing. During a routine change in our network topology that _should_ have gone unnoticed, our load-balancing switch, Piggy, decided it didn’t want to do its job anymore. This is a change that we have made in the past with no problems whatsoever. A reset of the switch brought back mail and web services. Downtime was a very long and frustrating 5 minutes while we tracked down the problem — we apologize for the trouble, and rest assured we won’t be moving etherchannel interfaces between switch blades in the middle of the day anymore. -The Sonic Operations Team and many screaming voices from Tech Support

Tue Jan 30 13:23:22 PST 2001 — We experienced a brief DOS attack over the last few minutes. It appears that one of our colo customer’s servers had been compromised. They’ve been taken off of the network and the issues have been resolved. -Kelsey, Eli and Scott.

Mon Jan 29 12:52:34 PST 2001 — We’ve made some fixes to ‘twig’, our new web based email reader client to address issues with it moving email to a location where POP clients could find it. This resolves compatibility issues for customers who sometimes use the web-mail tool, and sometimes use POP email clients such as Outlook or Eudora. Please let us know if you observe any troubles by posting to the local twig discussion group:

news://news.sonic.net/sonic.help.twig

You can access twig at:

www.sonic.net/twig/

-Nathan and Dane

Thu Jan 25 12:22:01 PST 2001 — Microsoft’s name servers are down again. -Kelsey and Eli

Wed Jan 24 12:44:59 PST 2001 — Information on what IDG and CNN are calling Microsoft’s “blackout” can be found here: www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/computing/01/25/microsoft.web.problems.ap/index.html -Chris and Scott