Author: admin

Sun Aug 20 00:41:57 PDT 2000 — SOLVED: Packet loss and latency on UUNet. (whew!) UUNet now says this was an ATM interface that was having problems. Quote: ‘this is a known issue with Cisco ATM interfaces’. (Oh yeah? Why did it take 20 hours to fix?) Anyway, we now know the magic words to use should it happen again. Additionally, throughout the day, I’ve been writing a packet loss and latency monitoring tool that will automatically notify us of another problem like this. Called ‘See’, the tool keeps a weather eye out for problems with any of our NSP’s — a kind of minimal ‘Internet weather report.’ Please visit news:sonic.net for more information. The Cable & Wireless T3 is still down, as we are awaiting resolution of the problems with their network in San Francisco. -Scott

Sat Aug 19 23:33:00 PDT 2000 — Routing loop on Cable and Wireless. I guess I spoke too soon. I should have said ‘rest assured we won’t be bringing up the T3 until UUNet fixes their network UNLESS Cable and Wireless dies a miserable and savage death.’ Which they did: their San Francisco network just lost connectivity to the Internet. Just got off the phone with Cable & Wireless: they are conducting emergency maintenance in San Francisco. Man, when it rains, it pours… The UUNet T3 is back up (latency and all) and we will shifting back as soon as CW has completed their maintenance. -Scott

Sat Aug 19 22:33:16 PDT 2000 — Packet loss and latency on UUNet. The gentleman at UUNet tech support informed me that he saw latency. but no packet loss. I had to bring up the T3, demonstrate that there was both latency and packet loss, and then shut it down again. Each time we shut down a T3, we experience intermittent loss of connectivity to some sites while routes converge on the remaining T3’s. I apologize if you noticed a hiccup in the Internet tonight, and rest assured we won’t be bringing up the T3 until UUNet fixes their network. -Scott

Sat Aug 19 21:49:41 PDT 2000 — Packet loss and latency on UUNet. Still no resolution, and indeed, the problem appears to have gotten worse. We’ve shut down the UUNet T3 pending a resolution. Meanwhile, I was able to get around the full mailbox situation, and I’m on the phone with them now while their tech support gets ahold of their NOC. -Scott

Sat Aug 19 20:29:37 PDT 2000 — Packet loss and latency on UUNet. Still no resolution, and calls to UUNet’s multi-megabit support line have been dumped into a voice mailbox that is full for the last few hours. I was able to contact someone via a back channel, but we can’t estimate how long this is going to take — methinks UUNet has seriously dropped the ball on this one. -Scott

Sat Aug 19 16:08:20 PDT 2000 — Packet loss and latency on UUNet. UUNet has (finally!) identified the problem: a switch card has lost its mind. The have already dispatched someone to replace it, and we should see resolution shortly. -Scott and Dane

Sat Aug 19 15:07:11 PDT 2000 — Packet loss and latency on UUNet. Dane and I have been tag-teaming UUNet since early this morning to solve a problem with packet lost and high latency to some other UUNet customers. We are starting to growl at them, as over 12 hours is just too long for this type of problem. Shutting down the UUNet T3 (and running through Cable & Wireless) won’t help the situation, as we see the same high-latency and loss when going through CW. Updates as they occur… -Scott and Dane

Fri Aug 18 16:33:00 PDT 2000 — Sonic.net is pleased to announce the launch of a new turnkey private dedicated server co-location offering.

www.sonic.net/sales/cobalt/

For customers who receive a moderate or heavy traffic load and who want the features and freedom of their own private web server, the RaQ is a great solution! Using a simple web interface, you can administer your website, and you can even host several websites on a single server. Other features such as optional email hosting, virtual server FTP hosting, mailing list management and more make the RaQ a great environment for your website and other services hosted at your domain name. Sonic.net is offering three levels of Cobalt RaQ servers to introduce this program; the RaQ 3, RaQ 3i, and RaQ 4r. All three RaQ systems include more than 10 gigabytes of hard disk, the Apache web server, support for Microsoft Frontpage extensions, CGI and Perl, telnet, ftp, ssh, and web interface administration.

Sonic.net is offering co-location with dedicated Cobalt hardware included starting at $195.00 per month. There’s no better way to get started with your own private server.

For further information check out our Cobalt co-location website at: www.sonic.net/sales/cobalt/

-Dane and Scooter

Fri Aug 18 15:24:09 PDT 2000 — After a few periodic lockups, we’ve replaced the equipment on the Santa Rosa end of our link to our San Rafael office POP. Downtime during the swap was less than a minute, and no users were disconnected. We hope that this will resolve the failures that we’ve seen which have caused a few brief interruptions at that POP. Note that redundant phone numbers that reach another POP are available for users in the San Rafael service area; see our support page to look up a list of local numbers for your location. -Dane

Fri Aug 18 15:20:14 PDT 2000 — Our primary Network Appliance storage array, freezer.sonic.net was offline for about two minutes due to a network cabling problem. It appears that the cable was not well seated in the Lucent patch bay here, and during replacement of other network cables, it came loose. The NFS storage array hosts all web, mail and shell data, and most servers here depend upon this data and paused while the filer was unavailable. -Dane, Steve, Kelsey, Scott and Scooter