Author: admin

Fri Dec 10 19:08:31 PST 1999 — After this AM’s card swap at PacBell, as the circuit load went up during the day, we’ve been seeing poor performance on the SMDS T3 here. I spent most of the day on the phone troubleshooting with Cisco, ADC Kentrox, PacBell and UUNet, and we seem to be reaching a consensus that the ADC CSU/DSU at the UUNet end of the circuit appears to be the source of the problem. We brought additional T1 capacity online today, and this relieved the circuit quite a bit, so performance today was a bit better overall than yesterday, with packet loss at around 3% and latency averaging 50ms.

I’m testing the circuit right now however, and I’m seeing performance around 11ms with no loss, which is wonderful. UUNet is supposed to be working with ADC right now, so it may be that they’ve found the trouble. I’ll put an update in the MOTD when I have full information. -Dane

Fri Dec 10 19:05:08 PST 1999 — We are working to isolate trouble in our 522-1003 dialup group which is causing calls to be answered by a modem with an odd tone which will not sync. Dave has been working much of the day on testing and trouble isolation, and we’re trying to pin this down. We’re stress testing nas21.sonic.net right now to try to isolate the trouble. If we can find it, we’ll eliminate it, and if we can’t, we’ll be rebooting the equipment a bit past midnight tonight. In our testing, we’ve found failure to connect about 30% of the time in this group, and fixing this is a very high priority for us. -Steve and Dave (dj:dj)

Fri Dec 10 19:03:54 PST 1999 — We have fixed the line trouble in our xxx-0174 dial group. It turned out to be a hardware problem in our Lucent/Livingston equipment in Oakland. This should eliminate a problem where 1 in five dial attempts would not be answered by a carrier in this dial group. -Steve (dj:dj)

Thu Dec 9 17:31:59 PST 1999 — One of the five T1 circuits in our xxx-0174 dial group is out of service. PacWest, the phone company that serves these lines out of Oakland is looking at the trouble, and will work to remedy it. While we haven’t seen any busy signals or other problems that we can duplicate here, we suspect that this may be causing some issues in that group. We’re hoping that PacWest will get this resolved this evening. -Dane and Steve

Thu Dec 9 17:30:03 PST 1999 — After quite a bit of diagnosis on our 1003 dial group, we’ve found that 10 PRIs, or 230 ports worth of capacity were not properly configured into the hunt group by PacBell when the lines were installed some months ago. As we’ve filled up the other 22 PRIs in this group, it appears that we’ve started to run into capacity problems which are not being manifest in the usual ‘busy signal’ way. PacBell this afternoon has corrected this, and we now have all 32 PRIs in service on this dial group. Hopefully this will resolve the poor performance in this dial group. -Dane

Thu Dec 9 14:21:13 PST 1999 — For the second night in a row, PacBell’s techs were unable to complete the card upgrade on our SMDS T3 circuit to UUNet. On Wednesday AM, the card was installed, but the PacBell staff didn’t know how to configure it. On Thursday AM, someone who knew how to configure the card came in for the upgrade, but had problems getting the config to work.

I’ve escalated this issue with our account team, and the techs at PacBell are being equipped with a full set of contacts so that if they have problems, they’ll be able to get the support they need to get this upgrade in place. Meanwhile, latency is much higher than it should be, and packet loss is at 7%-9%. We appreciate your patience as we escalate our harassment of PacBell’s Network Data Products Service Center until they get it right. The maintenance window for this fix is 3am until 4am on Friday morning, and I’ll be on the phone myself with PacBell to make sure there are no further excuses. -Dane

Wed Dec 8 12:33:27 PST 1999 — PacBell has scheduled maintenance on our SMDS T3 to UUNet for tonight at 3 AM PST. This card swap moves us to a duplexed card with more CPU power, and PacBell believes that this will address the latency and packet loss that we’re seeing on this primary circuit right now. We’ve been through a long process, and have tried many fixes, and we hope that this brings us to final resolution. Thanks for your patience during times of slow performance. -Dane

Wed Dec 8 12:22:57 PST 1999 — We have upgraded memory and swap in the log processing system to three quarters of a gigabyte. This upgrade was needed to handle log processing of www.sonic.net and multihomed logs. Looking at the complete stats, we’re serving over three million hits per day right now! Stats for multihomed sites and for www.sonic.net are available using the stats interface at www.sonic.net/stats/. To access stats for a multihome, you must be the owner, but all users can browse stats for www.sonic.net.

Tue Dec 7 12:39:35 PST 1999 — Update on T3 packet loss. PacBell has gotten support advice which is leading them toward a new high speed duplexed line card for our SMDS T3 circuit to UUNet. They are currently working on the engineering design for this change, and we’re hoping they’ll be able to shift us over tonight or tommorow night. Meanwhile, latency is high, and packet loss is present. Thanks for your patience as Sonic.net, UUNet and PacBell work through this trouble. -Dane

Tue Dec 7 15:24:09 PST 1999 — Sonic.net has partnered with Akamai Technologies to deliver content from the most popular websites on a ‘zero hop’ basis.

Akamai has colocated five new servers here in Sonic.net’s Santa Rosa data center which are dedicated to delivering content to our customers. Used by major sites including Yahoo! and CNN, Akamai’s FreeFlow technology enhances Web performance by accelerating the delivery of robust, secure content with animation, graphics, streaming media and interactivity.

For more information and a photo of the new servers, see:

www.sonic.net/expansion/akamai/