Wed Dec 14 00:01:02 PST 2005 — New Shell News. On Wed, Dec 14, we will swing the “shell.sonic.net” and “bolt.sonic.net” names over to the new host. All that is left to do before the move is to get newshell an ip6 address and connect it to the 6bone. -Scott

Mon Dec 12 11:56:54 PST 2005 — New Shell News. On Tue, Dec 13, we will swing the “shell.sonic.net” and “bolt.sonic.net” names over to the new host, after all requests in the sonic.net newsgroup have been handled. “oldshell.sonic.net” will point at the old shell host during our transition period. -Scott

Fri Dec 9 15:57:07 PST 2005 — Focal POP capacity issue. One of the dialup concentrators at our Focal POP has gone unresponsive. We have a technician en-route with spare gear, and ETR is approximately two hours. Until then, users dialing numbers ending in -9811 may experience busy signals due to a lack of capacity. As always, we have plenty of space at our other POPs. To find an alternate dial-up number, visit: www.sonic.net/popf/

Sorry for the inconvenience! -Nathan, Russ, Chris and Zeke

Update: Fri Dec 9 17:50:41 PST 2005 — All capacity at the Focal POP is back on-line. Sorry for the busy signals! -Nathan and Russ

Fri Dec 9 13:42:36 PST 2005 — Update: Broadlink problems resolved. All Broadlink customers should be back on line. -Broadlink

Fri Dec 9 13:22:27 PST 2005 — Broadlink outage affecting most Broadlink WDSL customers. All Broadlink Wireless DSL towers except one are currently offline with no ETR at the moment. -Kavan

Thu Dec 1 11:36:23 PST 2005 — Web logs and statistics were unavailable. An error in log rotation resulted in statistics not being generated for websites for the last three days. The problem has been fixed and we have taken steps to ensure the problem does not occur again.

For more information about the Webalizer Web Statistics tool and why it is useful please see our helpful FAQ on the subject:

www.sonic.net/support/faq/web/webalizer.shtml

-Augie

Sun Nov 27 11:23:43 PST 2005 — News server issues and maintenance. Another configuration problem revealed itself over the past few days with the new news cluster. During troubleshooting some of the local sonic.* groups accidentally had articles older than 30 days purged from the overviews. The affected groups are sonic.announce, sonic.antispam, sonic.general, sonic.help.colo, sonic.help.www, sonic.os.unix and sonic.net. I should be able to restore all articles in the groups but it is impossible to match all of the article numbering previously assigned. As a result, all posts made after the migration to the new cluster will show as new again. While the restoration is taking place the feeds to the reader boxes will be paused and no new news will arrive. Posts made locally will be fed to all of our peers but will not appear until the internal feeds are restarted. -Kelsey

Update: Sun Nov 27 14:00:16 PST 2005 — The overviews for the affected groups have been rebuilt. However, this was not a perfect or seamless process. While the archives have been rebuilt there are some apparent issues. First, a few posts from this morning seem to have been lost. Second, some of the groups will exhibit duplicate articles for the past couple of weeks. Additionally, some users may need to unsubscribe and resubscribe or otherwise purge their client’s caches on the affected groups. I apologize for the bumps in the deployment of the new news cluster. -Kelsey

Wed Nov 23 07:54:14 PST 2005 — Shell server upgrade. The new shell server is currently on the Net as “newshell.sonic.net”. After a suitable migration period, it will become “Bolt.sonic.net” (and “Shell.sonic.net”). The server allows customers to execute Linux commands, compile Linux programs (which might be cgi-bin’s), and perform operations generally expected on a Unix timeshare system.

The system sports dual hyper-threaded 2.8GHz Xeon processors bolted in to a motherboard with 2GB of RAM. The system is running our standard production Linux distribution, Redhat 7.3 (with patches to make the system current.)

While we’ve made efforts to provide a shell environment similar to that found on the current Bolt.sonic.net, there will be differences. Indeed, many programs have been updated, while some we did not install on the system to reduce cruft. The idea: anything missing that a customer would like installed on the new system can be installed upon request. Discussions regarding such requests — as well as any problems encountered or questions — can be found on the following Sonic.net newsgroup:

news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net

(Note: not all browsers understand the news:// protocol. One browser that will read news:// is Mozilla/Thunderbird or Mozilla/Mail and News. www.mozilla.org )

-Scott … and Dane, who is a serious shell user.

Wed Nov 23 07:50:00 PST 2005 — Earthquake. At approximately 6:46am, we had a magnitude 2.7 earthquake Northwest of Santa Rosa. Information regarding the quake can be found here:

earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/Quakes/nc40181322.htm

Update: Link and time corrected at 8:25am.

-Scott

Mon Nov 21 18:58:58 PST 2005 — Support hours for Thanksgiving. On Thursday, Nov 24, Sonic.net technical support will be closed after 5 pm in observance of Thanksgiving. We will return to our regular schedule (7am to 11pm) on Friday. Happy Holidays! -Eli and the Support team