Author: admin

Wed Dec 22 17:18:46 PST 1999 — Sonic.net will be closed Friday December 24th and Saturday December 25th for the holidays. Have a great holiday weekend! Support will re-open on Sunday, and our main office will be open on Monday. -Dane

Thu Dec 16 18:08:53 PST 1999 — As part of our ongoing effort to speed up the delivery of mail, we have made a processor upgrade and doubled the amount of RAM in Prop.sonic.net, which is one of the six servers we use to process inbound mail. We’re seeing better performance, and efforts continue. Eli, Scott, and Kelsey

Wed Dec 15 14:19:36 PST 1999 — Due to a problem with an e-mail server that we are still investigating, it appears that we may have lost or deferred some percentage of the email that was received here on Tuesday and early Wednesday morning.

Internet e-mail transport is designed to be completely fail-safe, and in fact the logs on the server indicate that it was successfully making deliveries, but it does not appear to have been actually writing the messages to the user’s mailboxes. The design of the e-mail transport protocol does not allow for this type of failure, and we’re currently doing testing to duplicate and characterize the problem. When the trouble was discovered, the server was taken offline immediately, and it is no longer handling any email. This server is one of our six e-mail hosts, and it shared the overall e-mail processing load.

Our logs do include full information on the addresses of all senders and recipients, and each individual Sonic.net user who has been affected will be sent a list shortly including the date and time of each message that should have been delivered, plus the senders e-mail address. In addition, Sonic.net will be proactively informing each e-mail sender from whom a message is missing about the details of that message so that they can re-send any missing messages from their sent-mail folders.

We’re very sorry about this uncharacteristic failure, and we are working to minimize it’s impact by informing senders and recipients now. -Dane, Scott and Eli

Tue Dec 14 08:36:11 PST 1999 — The mail server handling outbound email for most customers had a number of problems overnight, and I’ve made some changes to fix this trouble. It was having some problems restarting sendmail during a scheduled reload, leaving the system without a mailer deamon running. Users trying to send mail from a SMTP client via mail.sonic.net would have received a message about a refused connection, and any outbound email would remain in their outbox. During the next attempt, all that email will be processed.

We spent much of yesterday backlogged by about an hour on email, and we brought another mail server online Monday afternoon to handle the load. These changes should allow us to stay caught up with the huge email volume that we’re handling here now. Sorry about the quirky behavior and delays, we’ll keep an eye on things this AM to make sure that our six email servers remain stable and fast.

Tue Dec 14 01:25:34 PST 1999 — We had some problems around 1am with our main outbound mail server. I restarted the mailer software at 1:15am, and all is well now. If you had trouble sending email, please try again. -Dane

Mon Dec 13 18:41:12 PST 1999 — UUNet and PacBell are still trying to find and eliminate the performance trouble on our primary T3. We’ll keep you posted here when we have more details! -Dane

Sat Dec 11 09:07:38 PST 1999 — UUNet is still working with PacBell and ADC Kentrox on the trouble on the SMDS T3. We’ve offloaded some traffic, so it’s performing pretty well today, but we still don’t have a final solution. We’ll continue to press forward on this. -Dane

Sat Dec 11 09:05:49 PST 1999 — We’ve found two cards in nas21.sonic.net that were often answering with a modem tone that would never synchronize. Dave has written some testing tools that did a great job at nailing this trouble down. We’ll be looking at nas22 through nas25 as well to see if we can find any other trouble. We’ve taken the bad cards out of service, and this should make the 1003 dialup group much more reliable! -Dane and Dave

Sat Dec 11 09:04:21 PST 1999 — mailbox.sonic.net, the machine that handles add-on mailboxes had trouble this AM. It’s had intermittent problems with it’s Ethernet interface, and we’ll take steps to avoid this in the future. It’s back online now, sorry about the unavailability of POP for these users for a time. -Dane

Fri Dec 10 09:48:52 PST 1999 — Thunder’s web logs were corrupted last night and there is no way to recover them. The logs were most likely damaged during the copy from thunder to the log host, timber. All multihomed web site stats are affected by this including the Urchin reports. We have taken steps to prevent this from happening again. -Kelsey