Author: admin

Thu Jan 7 19:50:10 PST 1999 — Buzz, the new mail server. Yesterday morning’s test of the new mail server (making it ‘prog-relay’) went well, except for a few problems: most importantly, email for support@sonic.net was either deferred or bounced for a few hours. (Sorry about that — and thank you, Eric, for figuring it out. 🙂

At 2am, January 8th, we will let it handle mail for _just_ the sonic.net domain. Email for other domain names won’t be affected.

Again, transitioning to the new server should be seamless, and should require no action by Sonic members. (With one exception: folks using complicated .forward files may want to examine ‘man dot-qmail’ on Bolt.) -Scott

Tue Jan 5 17:50:27 PST 1999 — New mail server testing. We have completed installation and configuration of ‘Buzz’, our new mail server. This system will eventually replace Sub, our old mail server. Transitioning to the new server should be seamless, and will require no action by Sonic members.

At 2am, January 6th, we will point the ‘prog-relay’ host alias at Buzz, which will only affect those members who use prog-relay. (If you don’t know what ‘prog-relay’ is, then you won’t be affected. 🙂 This will allow us to observe the system delivering real traffic — if there is any trouble that can’t be immediately corrected, we will revert to the old system. -Scott

Fri Jan 1 18:23:26 PST 1999 — A reminder: Running IRC ‘Bots’ is not permitted, and any violations will result in locked accounts. -Eli

Thu Dec 31 11:10:11 PST 1998 — All offsite remote access equipment has been upgraded to ComOS 3.8.2. This does not affect equipment located in Santa Rosa. This version (just released) fixes many connectivity problems. For a full list of fixes, you can check out the release notes at ftp.livingston.com/pub/le/upgrades/release382.txt.

Sonic would also like to wish all of you a very happy New Year and best wishes for a prosperous year ahead! -Brian

Wed Dec 23 15:25:34 PST 1998 — Above.net had a systems crash at approximately 2:30 PM today that affected dial up access to some areas in the South Bay. The outage lasted for about 1 hour. They have resolved the problem and our Above.net POP is now back online. -Brian

Sat Dec 19 15:36:32 PST 1998 — Between about 1:50pm and 2:11pm, one of our web servers (‘Storm,’ www.sonic.net) stopped serving web pages. Investigation reveals an almost certain explanation: a CGI program caused the system to become ‘swap-bound’ (that is, doing a lot of work using disk-based virtual memory).

Our web servers run CGI’s within specific resource limits; but as it turns out, one resource limit remained unset on Storm — RLIMIT_AS, the ‘address space’, or virtual memory, limit. That limit is now set, so we shouldn’t see this problem anymore. (Nevertheless, we’ll keep a weather eye out for any more problems with Storm. 🙂 -Scott

Wed Dec 16 17:04:20 PST 1998 — We wish everyone a happy and joyous holiday season! -Sonic

Fri Dec 4 13:45:14 PST 1998 — Network connections for nas21 and nas22 have been moved. We also utilized the opportunity to upgrade nas21’s power system so that its capacity may be agumented, as well as giving it a much-needed firmware upgrade. Multilink PPP across chassis (MPIP) seems to be working much better now.

Bolt’s move went well, and it’s been upgraded to a Pentium II/450 with 256mb of ram (the old system was a PPro-200/128), and has also been moved from 10mbit to 100mbit switched ethernet. There should be a noticeable performance improvement, especially during periods of heavy usage. The new system also includes redundant power and cooling, SMP capability, and a spiffy deathstar-black rackmount chassis. 🙂 In other news, while we were moving bolt, sonic.sonic.net (the primary authentication/DNS server) started having some swap corruption problems and needed a reboot. There should have been no noticeable reduction in service, since the secondary auth/DNS server (boom.sonic.net) was functioning properly. Also, the news server (ultra.sonic.net) had filesystem troubles, and some local posts may have been delayed while it was repaired. -Scott, Brian, Devin, Eric, Ian, Logan, Eli, Dane, Asa, Kat, and Arak (who doesn’t really work here)

Thu Dec 3 13:01:46 PST 1998 — Some folks have noticed a difference in performance between dialup connections on nas21 and nas22. After some investigation (including some special monitoring by Devin and Ian — thanks guys), we have identified a congestion situation in our switched infrastructure, as well as a way to prevent it. To avoid a similar congestion situation this evening, we are currently moving network connections to some of our gear; unfortunately, this may result in intermittent loss of connectivity (for a few seconds) while our switch tables adjust themselves to the new topology. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we’ll try to make the impact as minimal as possible.

Additionally, we will be moving the shell server (Shell.sonic.net, aka Bolt.sonic.net) tonight at 10:30pm. That will be a physical move into our new facility, which should take less than 30 minutes. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. -Scott, Brian, Ian, Devin, Logan, Eli, Asa

Thu Nov 19 21:42:15 PST 1998 — Starting around 8pm or so, our mail server was severely impacted by a tremendous influx of email. Someone spammed AOL from a forged domain name, and unfortunately, we host that domain. This means that the tens of thousands of bounce messages were returned to the domain owner’s mailbox. [As of Fri Nov 20 00:31:16, I’ve counted 23,000 messages so far. /sd]

That wouldn’t have been a problem — except, AOL’s mail server farm was all cooperating to deliver these messages. In other words: thundering herds of AOL mail servers stampeded Sub, our mail server. We resolved that by turning off connectivity between AOL’s server farm’s networks and us, and then slowly bringing up connectivity, allowing traffic to clear one network at a time. I’ll post more about that on news:sonic.general. -Scott