Author: admin

Sat Jan 24 01:22:19 PST 1998 — Our news server is having some troubles this evening. It crashed at about 9pm, and as of now, it’s still checking it’s massive filesystems. During this time, users can read news, and make posts, but the posts won’t be injected into the system until the check is complete. Don’t be surprised if posts take a while to show up on the system this evening. -Dane

Tue Jan 20 19:41:32 PST 1998 — We’ve just added more drive space to our Network Appliance NFS filer. The filer now has eight four gig disks in service, including the parity disk and a hot spare. This upgrade was done during heavy utilization, and because of the way the NetApp is designed, no services were interrupted. The disk is plugged in, the filer spends 15 minutes preparing it, and then all of the mounted hosts have more space! Zero downtime. Here’s before and after df output: Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on / 17237284 16438352 798932 95% / And 20 minutes later, after the disk is installed: / 20684744 16310496 4374248 79% /

The filer has room for four more four gig disks in it’s current storage shelves, and we can add two more shelves to the unit in the future for a total raw storage capacity of about 96 gigs. -Dane

Fri Jan 16 10:16:51 PST 1998 — We had a problem with our authentication server this morning. Users were unable to authenticate for about 15 minutes. We apologize for any inconvience. -Brian

Tue Jan 13 17:03:34 PST 1998 — Pacific Bell’s reprovisioning of our hunt group to a directory hunt has fixed the capacity issues which have been a problem for the past few weeks. There are a couple remaining issues which we’re working on, but the bottom line is that phone lines and modems are now working and available! Thanks much for your patience as we’ve worked through this Pacific Bell issue. -Dane

Tue Jan 13 16:59:08 PST 1998 — Our news server has had a few crashes in the past couple days. With the kernel version we are running on this host, there is a problem which can lead to this type of failure in multiprocessor systems. A new version has been released (2.0.33) and are working on an upgrade. Because of these crashes, and the disk errors which result from them, we are running a bit backlogged on incoming news. This backlog should be cleared shortly. -Dane

Sat Jan 10 12:30:10 PST 1998 — On Sunday the 18th at 2am we will be upgrading the memory in our Network Appliance NFS filer. Downtime will be between 5 and 15 minutes. This downtime will affect many services. Local www, local ftp and mail will all be unavailable. Shell access will be available, but attempts to check mail will block until the filer is back online. We’re upgrading the filer all the way to it’s max capacity (4x it’s current configuration) so that we won’t have to do this again in the future. We can add and replace disks without taking the system offline, but memory upgrades require downtime, so we don’t want to do this again. -Dane

Sat Jan 10 12:26:21 PST 1998 — Pacific Bell completely reprogrammed the 522-1002 hunt group between 2am and about 6am last night. We hope that this will fix the problems which have been affecting that group. As it turns out, Pacific Bell did not contact NorTel support until yesterday, and there is a third type of group called directory hunting which must be used in groups with more than 100 channels. This has been implemented, and things appear to be working well. We will make an effort to simulate a high load condition before Monday night to test the reconfigured group all the way to its end. Thanks to Alma at PacBell and Scott here at Sonic for working the graveyard shift for us. -Dane

Sat Jan 10 19:46:29 PST 1998 — Our news server was offline briefly this afternoon after a crash. With the kernel version we are running on this host, there is a problem which can lead to this type of failure in multiprocessor systems. A new version has been released (2.0.33) and we’ll be upgrading shortly. -Dane

Fri Jan 9 15:57:58 PST 1998 — Pacific Bell believes that they have found the source of the trouble, and in order to fix it, they need to rebuild the entire hunt group. They will be doing this work starting at 2am on Saturday morning, and they expect to be finished by 5am. During this time, X2 and ISDN single-B access will be unavailable. (fingers crossed) -Dane

Thu Jan 8 17:14:07 PST 1998 — Pacific Bell found a programming error in the hunt group setup. Unfortunately, this was not the problem, and they are still looking for the source of the busy signals. I’ve spoken with Pacific Bell three times today, and I’ve also been working with the California Public Utilities commission. Because of ongoing issues with ISDN quality of service, a CPUC decision was reached last year – decision 97-03-021 allows us to collect damages from Pacific Bell for extended outages like this one. This is nice, as we’ve spent over $55,000 to equip and install the lines which should be serving you, and they’re not working!

We have filed an informal complaint with the CPUC, and they have contacted Pacific Bell on our behalf. I don’t know if this will help much, and we’re considering filing a formal complaint. If this issue cannot be resolved by early next week, we will discontinue adding new customers until it is fixed. Thanks for your understanding and continued support. -Dane