Dynamic DSL Subscriber Rebalancing

Tonight at midnight, we will be moving some of our dynamic IP DSL subscribers from a heavily loaded SMS to a less-loaded one. This will only affect a small subset of customers in LATA1, which may see 5-10 minutes of downtime as their circuits are migrated and DHCP leases renewed. If you find that you are affected by this move, you may want to reboot your computer and/or router when you lose connectivity. The reboot will clear your DHCP lease, and may allow you to pick up a new lease more quickly.

-Jared

Update: The subscriber move has been completed as planned. There were no problems with the migration, and all affected customers should be back online, only having experienced a few minutes of downtime at most.

ATM Hardware Maintenance

This Friday at 12:01 AM we will be inserting an interface card into one of our ATM switches at our San Francisco POP. This new card will allow us to continue to expand our ATM infrastructure to support DSL growth. Card insertion is not expected to cause any interruption of service to customers served by this ATM switch.

Update: This maintenance has been completed with zero customer impact.

-Jared and Nathan

Router Software Maintenance

Tonight at midnight, we will be reloading one of the routers that serve Business-T and FRATM in Northern California onto new software. We expect this new software to resolve the performance problems that have cropped up periodically on this router.

All customers served by this router will suffer less than 10 minutes of downtime during this reload.

-Jared, Dusty and Tim

Update: The software upgrade has been successfully completed. All affected customers were offline for less than 5 minutes.

Phishing Warning

Starting around 3:00 AM this morning, emails have been going out to our customers instructing them to provide their password for email maintenance. The email is a phishing scam. Phishing is a type of malicious email designed to acquire personal information and aid in Identify Theft. Sonic.net will never ask for account details via email.

We have blocked the source of the phishing scam, and we are in the process of contacting every customer who has replied to fraudulent e-mail. Please call Sonic.net Support if you need your password reset.
– Adam and Josh

Phone system outage

Our phone system is not taking incoming calls this morning.  We are working with the phone system and phone line providers to get the issue resolved as soon as possible.  Please feel free to use our LiveHelp system linked to from the navigation pane of the website, or email support@sonic.net for non-urgent requests.  Thank you for your patience.

Update — We have isolated the issue to our phone line provider and they are continuing to work on resolving the issue as soon as possible.  We will continue to work with them until this has been resolved.  The network operations hotline is still in service for co-location, and hi-cap customers.  Thank you again for your patience.

Update 10:21a.m. — Phone lines are back up at this time.

Sonic.net releases a few good Blogs.

For the last few weeks we here at Sonic.net have been working on setting up a few new Blogs to increase transparency into our company and keep our customers and the public at large more informed about our latest developments.

These Blogs are:

The Sonic.net CEO Blog – http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/ : Postings from Dane Jasper our CEO.

The Sonic.net Insider Blog – http://corp.sonic.net/insider/ : The inside scoop on the goings on at Sonic.net.

The Sonic.net Internals Blog – http://corp.sonic.net/internals/ : The technical internal workings of Sonic.net; a blog for System and Network Admins.

The Sonic.net Status Blog – http://corp.sonic.net/status/ : Messages on the current status of Sonic.net’s systems and equipment.

For ease of use you can see the latest content from all these Blogs aggregated at http://corp.sonic.net/blogs/ with links at the top of the page to the other Blogs; clicking on the title of a post will take you to the original posting where you can then leave a comment if you like.

It is our hope that these efforts along with other efforts will increase the communication and transparency we have with our customers and that that improved communication will improve the experience that our customers have with Sonic.net.

Non-Intrusive GigaMAN Maintenance

Tonight between 8 PM and 12 AM we will be performing maintenanance with AT&T on our GigaMAN from our Santa Rosa datacenter to our San Francisco POP. All traffic has been removed from this link, onto the other side of our redundant ring, so there should be no customer impact.

-Jared and Nathan

Update: Due to complications with AT&T we have pushed this maintenance to tomorrow (June 24) from 8 PM to 12 AM.

Early AM Customer SQL Connectivity

Early this morning PDT, during routine maintenance, our Customer SQL server exhibited problems with our replication setup that required immediate action to ensure the integrity of our customer backups that we have here. During this time, you may have seen connection errors as the connections were refused as the problem was being resolved. The issue was fixed, bringing the system back online taking connections as normal.

Update to our Web Mail Service.

We have updated our Web Mail software at https://webmail.sonic.net/atmail/ to the latest vendor release.

This release addresses many of the concerns our customers had with the previous release and adds a few new features; most important of which is full support for the latest release of the Firefox browser (Firefox 3).

If you have not tried our Web Mail software, please do give it a try and send feedback to support@sonic.net. The software offers three interfaces (Advanced, Simple and Basic) which allows our customers to choose the right Web Mail experience for themselves. If you have a mobile phone with web capabilities, you can visit http://m.sonic.net/ for email access from your mobile phone.

New Member Tools available today

We have deployed about half of our New Member Tool suite this
morning. Our new system has been designed from the ground up to
be easier and more intuitive to use.

The new tools available include the following:

  • Account (includes billing, quotas, password changing, etc.)
  • Databases (add, remove, administer)
  • Servers (for users with colos or leased 1Us only)

This is in addition to the Host Records and MX Tools that had been
previously deployed.

The URL for the new tools is http://members.sonic.net/.

Not all users will have access to all tools – for instance, users
with mailbox accounts cannot create databases and so that option
will not be visible to them.

Please check it out and let us know what you think! Feedback can
be sent to members@sonic.net.

— Dianne, Chris, Craig and Kelsey