Fri Jun 10 21:43:41 PDT 2005 — Sacramento dialup problems. Dialup service numbers in Davis and Sacramento, area codes 530 and 916, ending in either 3 or 5 are currently not working. The carrier is working on this problem. Dialup numbers ending in other numbers are currently working. Please check our POP Finder to find a different number. www.sonic.net/popf/ -John Update: Our carrier for numbers ending in 3 and 5, including 707-522-1003, are working on their network and switches tonight. This is causing out of service messages on some numbers. They expect this work to be done by Saturday morning. -John

Thu Jun 9 09:49:29 PDT 2005 — Spam Filtering Upgrades. Over the past week we’ve made some improvements to our SPAM filtering. Our in-house maintained milter filter has had a number of small improvements and bug fixes deployed which have increased the number of messages we’re able to reject at the MTA substantially. Yesterday, SpamAssassin was upgraded to 3.0.4 in order to take advantage of new rules and scoring as well as numerous small improvements and bug fixes. Users should notice a reduction in both the number of messages in graymail and a reduction of spam in their inboxes. -Kelsey and Russ

Tue Jun 7 17:50:00 PDT 2005 — Scam Warning. Recently numerous emails have been sent to our customers claiming to be from Sonic.net instructing them to go to a link to confirm their account name and password, or else their account will be deleted. These emails are not from Sonic.net, they are from scammers trying to steal people’s accounts. Sonic.net will never ask for or send personal and private information via email, and we will never email you an attachment. If you receive these types of emails, you can either just delete them or report them to the Anti Phishing Working Group at: antiphishing.org/ -Alan and the Sonic Abuse Department

Thu Jun 2 10:50:05 PDT 2005 — Anycast DNS Servers: For the past three weeks we have been running fully redundant anycasted DNS servers hosted at our datacenters in Santa Rosa and San Francisco. Each DNS server plex consists of a hardware load balancer, three real name servers and a routing and monitoring server. This brings true high availability and increased performance to our name servers. We are already well on our way to providing geographically diverse authoritative-only non-recursive name servers as well. Hardware has already been deployed at a facility in New York. For more information please see news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net -Kelsey and Nathan

Wed May 25 14:54:14 PDT 2005 — Webmail Issues: Webmail was unavailable for a while this afternoon when a routine upgrade of the clustered webmail servers went awry. Webmail has been working correctly since 14:15. -Augie and Kelsey

Wed May 25 14:16:09 PDT 2005 — Problems with mail to att.net. Since early Sunday morning, all email from Sonic.net’s network has been blocked by att.net and all of their subdomains. We are working to get this unblocked with their abuse department, who is being quite unresponsive to the issue. We hope to have this issue resolved shortly. -Alan and Operations —Update— All att.net hosted domains are now accepting mail from mail.sonic.net. We have removed the work-around that we had in place.

Tue May 24 07:39:34 PDT 2005 — DSL outage. At 7:08am our DSL concentrator in Santa Rosa locked up and ceased passing traffic due to an apparent software bug. We reloaded it around 20 minutes later, which brought folks back on line by 7:33am. This outage effected both DSL and FRATM T1 customers served out of our Santa Rosa datacenter. -Nathan and Jasper

Sat May 21 10:33:27 PDT 2005 — Outbound mail cluster fixed. Our outbound mail cluster, “mail.sonic.net”, had a problem this morning, which we corrected. (For a few moments, “mail.sonic.net” wasn’t even answering.) The mail cluster is currently up and fully redundant. -Scott, Nathan, and Augie

Sat May 14 01:10:37 PDT 2005 — Network maintenance complete. The software update to our second distribution switch went without trouble. Colo customers should not have noticed any lack of connectivity. Broadlink’s SMS was also updated without incident. Customers may have noticed 4-5 minutes of degraded connectivity. All network traffic is flowing smoothly at this time.

-Nathan and Jared

Wed May 11 19:08:53 PDT 2005 — Some mail delayed. While updating mail systems to avoid exploit by the latest Linux vulnerability, we discovered a misconfiguration that delayed some mail for 2.5 hours. Please note that no email was lost, it was only a fraction that was delayed. Mail is now flowing freely, and we are continuing to improve the security of our network. -Scott and Nathan