Author: admin

Tue Jan 6 20:29:04 PST 1998 — The repair issue mentioned in the last MOTD still has not been fixed, and we are experiencing busy conditions even though lines are available. As a short term solution, if you experience a busy signal, you should be able to dial past the bad area by calling 707-547-3210. This number will work for v.34, X2 and single-B ISDN.

I spoke with the FCC, the CPUC and Pacific Bell today, and it seems that there is an ISDN service guarantee that Pacific Bell filed with the CPUC last year which will allow us to get some credit for these lines which are not usable. I’ve gotten a bit of an agency run-around today, but we seem to be making progress. The folks at PacBell are working hard now on the repair, and they’ve escalated the issue with the technical support folks at Northern Telcom, manufacturers of the DMS100 switch which serves us. -Dane

Mon Jan 5 22:08:19 PST 1998 — Pacific Bell is still having capacity problems which are yielding busy signals for our customers. We’ve got 192 lines in one BRI based hunt group, and only the first 100 are usable. What this means is that we’ve got lines, and we’ve got modems, but users are getting a busy signal or reorder tone. We spent $45,000.00 on the equipment which serves these lines plus about $4600 in installation charges. Pacific Bell has been working on the issue since December 2nd. I spoke with the public utilities commission and the FCC today, and Sonic may be entitled to damages in this case in the amount of $230 per day, or about $7000 so far. We’ve informed Bell that we intend to persue this, and we’re hoping that they will escalate the repairs. We haven’t returned very many busy signals in the past few weeks to customers, but this Monday night has been particularly busy. See our lines graph for details: www.sonic.net/lines/

Mon Jan 5 19:20:04 PST 1998 — Strange happenings with NAS16 tonight — it was sending multiple authentication requests with the same serial number. However, unlike the last few times this has happened, we were able to isolate the apparent cause of the problem: excessive logging packets weren’t getting sent fast enough, consuming buffers and eating up memory in the device. We’ve ‘toned down’ the logging verbosity, which we expect will prevent a reoccurence. We apologize if you had trouble logging in this evening — hopefully we’ve got it licked! -Scott, Dane, Brian

Sat Jan 3 00:40:58 PST 1998 — An attempt to use the ftp server at sonic.sonic.net displays the following message: ‘500 Please connect to ftp.sonic.net or shell.sonic.net — thanks.’ Apparently, not all ftp clients display this message, though the better ones do. Please do use ftp.sonic.net (or shell.sonic.net) for ftp services on the Sonic network. Thanks.

Fri Jan 2 10:54:20 PST 1998 — Happy New Year! It’s time to get more goodies for the same money here at Sonic, and we’re pleased to announce that disk quotas have been raised from 36 megs to 50 megs. This new quota applies to your total usage across all filesystems, so you can use the space where you need it without any restrictions.

Fri Jan 2 10:52:01 PST 1998 — Because of a brief power failure last night, many of our X2 lines were unavailable until 9:30 this morning. Basicly, the equipment isn’t behaving well, and after a power cycle, doesn’t sync up with Pacific Bell’s switch. We’ve made some changes here in hopes of remedying this. If you recieve a reorder tone (which sounds like a very fast busy signal), this indicates either that you have caller ID blocking enabled, or that we’re having this sort of equipment problem. Your modem may simply report ‘BUSY’, so be sure to turn on the audio so that you can tell what is actually going on.

Sun Dec 28 21:25:06 PST 1997 — A summary of recent system events: * Saturday afternoon: Routing problem affecting single-user ISDN on PM7 (547-2000). Remote ISDN networks weren’t affected. * Sunday evening: History file problem on news server. Remote news reading was unavailable for approximately one hour. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Sun Dec 28 21:17:22 PST 1997 — A summary of recent upgrades: * email mailboxes moved to Network Appliance file server (faster,safer) * attached 12GB RAID-5 disk array to shell server (will be /home) To save typing, we’ll start calling that disk array by its product name: ‘Reflex7’. Planned upgrades for the near-term: * Reflex7 to become /home partition on shell server. * Mail server upgrade: new hardware, new OS installation, new message transport and delivery system (Qmail, Procmail) We postponed this morning’s replication of /home to the Reflex7, as that would result in an uncomfortable amount of downtime. Instead, we will use a two-pass system, same as we did when moving web data to the Network Appliance. This will minimize downtime. -Scott

Sat Dec 27 08:28:16 PST 1997 — We will be attaching our 12GB RAID-5 disk array to our shell host, Bolt.sonic.net, sometime LATE THIS EVENING (please note change :). This will require a reboot. If all goes well, we will move the /home partition to the disk array early tomorrow morning (3am or so), which will triple the size of /home. -Scott

Sat Dec 27 17:27:53 PST 1997 — Folks using single-user dialup ISDN on PM7 (547-2000) may have seen some strange routing this afternoon — that was _our_ fault, not your fault! We made a routing change that caused some problems, and it is now fixed. Sorry about that. -Scott