Author: admin

Fri Jan 7 11:51:51 PST 2000 — On Friday the 14th of Jan we will be removing all traces of statbot from our web servers. If you wish to keep the old stats you should copy the /stats directories from your multihomed website into another directory. Once the stats directory is removed there will be no way of recovering the old information. For those of you who don’t already know, the statbot package was replaced by urchin, which you may access at www.sonic.net/stats -Kelsey

Thu Jan 6 17:43:43 PST 2000 — Ultra, one of our mail servers, had a problem authenticating users. This caused some mail to bounce. We caught the the problem quickly and re-started the server. This caused very little impact. -Steve

Mon Jan 3 19:45:07 PST 2000 — It’s the first weekday after Y2K, and we’ve seen a number of minor cosmetic issues here and elsewhere on the Internet. Typical ones include dates displayed as year ‘100, or as 19100.

Here at Sonic.net, we’ve replaced the shell news reader ‘tin’ with a new version to address a problem where it was offering all groups as new upon startup, which meant you had to say ‘N’ to all groups to get into the program. The new version is 1.4.1, and is a release version that adds some nice new features as well. If you’re interested in continuing to run the old version, you can run ‘tin.old -q’ to get quiet mode so that it won’t offer you new groups. This will mean that you would get notification of legitimate new groups however, so we recommend just running the new version as ‘tin’.

Elm was listing some dates incorrectly, and we’ve updated to a newer version. The new version supports metamail better, and has a number of other new features. However, it does not include closely tied PGP integration, so you’ll need to filter any PGP mail to the command ‘pgp -fm’ if you use PGP. We actually recommend moving away from elm toward mutt, as it’s under much more active development, is faster, and supports larger mailboxes much better.

Our ‘Count.cgi’ counter program was displaying the year as ‘100’ instead of ’00’ for web pages where customers were using the counter to display the current date. We’ve patched the Count.cgi program to resolve this.

Our email invoicing program thought that the year was 2001 instead of 2000 and sent invoices to about 2% of our customers for 12 months longer than their usual billing period. This only affected customers billed by email, not credit card, so no charges were actually made. The software has been fixed, and new invoices have been sent to the affected users already, along with an email note of explanation.

Please keep us posted if you see any other odd behavior that you suspect may be related to the date change. Posting to news:sonic.help would be great. -Dane, Eli and Kelsey

Sat Jan 1 00:08:19 PST 2000 — Happy New Year everyone! Note the date/time stamp on this entry, ^^^^ =) -Dane & Dave

Fri Dec 31 10:03:55 PST 1999 — The free DSL equipment, setup, book and installation offer has been extended through midnight tonight. Today is the final day to order DSL and get free equipment and a free book. Installation and on-site setup is also free, so if you’ve been considering DSL, today is the day to order! Save $198 on the equipment, get a free copy of ‘DSL for Dummies’ and get on-site setup and installation at no charge. For full info, see our PacBell DSL sales page:

www.sonic.net/sales/dsl/pacbell/

Thu Dec 30 08:57:54 PST 1999 — Sonic.net will be closed on Saturday January 1st for New Years day. Technical support will be available on Sunday morning at 9am. If you have very urgent issues, email support@sonic.net and staff will be monitoring this email queue. We don’t anticipate any major Y2K issues here, and we look forward to a smooth new year. Celebrate safely, and have a great new year! -Dane

Thu Dec 30 08:54:55 PST 1999 — Today is the final day to order DSL and get free equipment and a free book. Installation and on-site setup is also free, so if you’ve been considering DSL, today is the day to order! Save $198 on the equipment, get a free copy of ‘DSL for Dummies’ and get on-site setup and installation at no charge. For full info, see our PacBell DSL sales page:

www.sonic.net/sales/dsl/pacbell/

Thu Dec 23 19:31:45 PST 1999 — About 20 minutes ago, our network came under a ‘denial of service’ attack. This disrupted local and Internet traffic for about 15 minutes, we have isolated the source and are filing security reports with the networks in question now. – Eli, Steve, Kelsey, Scott.

Thu Dec 23 17:36:12 PST 1999 — News.sonic.net was unavailable for about 15 minutes this afternoon, it required a long reboot and filesystems check, and is back online now. – Eli, Scott

Wed Dec 22 09:36:56 PST 1999 — Storm, our web server that hosts www.sonic.net and a few other multihomed domains had a kernel panic this morning. It required a system reboot and may have made the sonic.net web page unaccessible for a few minutes. – Steve, Kelsey and crew