Sat May 7 16:03:41 PDT 2005 — Google outage. Google is experiencing trouble with their DNS. Folks can still reach Google by IP address at the following link: 216.239.39.99/ We’ll try to find out what happened.

-Scott and Nathan

Update: Sat May 7 16:06:03 PDT 2005 — Google’s DNS appears to be working now. -Scott and Nathan

Mon May 2 10:53:08 PDT 2005 — Sonic.net now offers DSL in the Los Angeles area. We’ve expanded, please tell a friend in Southern California!

We are now offering our feature rich and cost effective DSL products in Southern as well as Northern California. SBC voice customers in the LA area can now order DSL service from Sonic.net. All our standard features are available for LA area customers, including firewalling, multicast, IPv6, HotSpot hosting, etc.

This expansion brings us to a total of three major California coverage areas: the greater Bay Area and Northern coastline, the Stockton area and now the LA area. A map showing these boundaries is available at:

www.sonic.net/sales/broadband/dsl/dsl_lata_map.gif

-Dane, John, Nathan, etc.

Fri Apr 29 17:35:19 PDT 2005 — News server disk failure. news.sonic.net has experienced a disk failure and is shut down for emergency maintenance. We’re working to restore the failed volume if possible, but do not have an ETR.

supernews.sonic.net and newscene.sonic.net, our other Usenet news servers, continue to operate normally. All news hierarchies on news.sonic.net (except for sonic.*) are available from either of these servers.

-Nathan and Kelsey

UPDATE – news.sonic.net has lost one disk from it’s binary spools but is otherwise back online and in service. -Kelsey, Eli, Scott, Nathan and Augie

Thu Apr 21 09:55:59 PDT 2005 — Broadlink Outage. Some Broadlink customers began experiencing connectivity problems around 9:40 am. this morning. The issue is being investigated. -Matt and Broadlink

UPDATE – The problem has been traced to Broadlink’s new backhaul equipment. Technicians are on the scene and they hope to have the issue resolved within 1/2 an hour. – Sonic.net and Broadlink Support

Thu Apr 21 14:26:11 PDT 2005 — DSL service interruption in Santa Rosa. We are experiencing a general DSL outage affecting much of the Santa Rosa area. ASI is working on the problem and we hope to have service restored soon. -Sonic.net Support

UPDATE – The DSL service interruption in Santa Rosa is due to emergency maintenance being performed by SBC. They hope to have service restored within an hour. -Sonic.net Support

Wed Apr 20 19:19:34 PDT 2005 — DSL Outage in Santa Rosa. At 5:47pm, ASI reported a general outage in the Santa Rosa area. All circuits on the SNRSCA01BB1 gear are directly affected, though reports of collateral sync-no-surf problems have been reported throughout the area. We have no ETR at this time. -Eli and John F

Update: ASI officially reports that service was successfully restored at 7:00pm. This is consistent with testing from our side at the time. -John F

Mon Apr 11 16:42:59 PDT 2005 — DSL Firewall Features Roll Out Tomorrow. This is a reminder that we will start rolling out the application of the DSL firewall features Tuesday morning, 4/12/05. We will apply them to successive groups of DSL customers at a rate that our technical support folks can manage. Please see Dane’s previous MOTD for details of this new service. -John, Nathan and Kelsey

Sat Apr 2 12:29:02 PST 2005 — BroadLink Scheduled Outage Notification. BroadLink is currently upgrading their wireless network backhaul, which will yield improved performance for wireless connected customers. BroadLink says:

“An important component of our upgrade plans will require a brief planned outage as we swap an old backhaul radio for a faster unit.

We will be making this change on Saturday morning (April 2nd) beginning at 9:00am. As we fine-tune the new system (or in the case of disaster revert to the old hardware) service will fluctuate significantly. The project should be completed by 12:00 Noon.”

While normally, intrusive network maintenance is done at night, tower safety requirements dictate that this work be done during daylight hours. Additionally, while normally upgrades can be built and tested prior to deployment, with the deployment then just being a quick switch-over, the local radio frequency spectrum usage requires that this upgrade be done with the current link offline, as the two would interfere with each other.

I believe that BroadLink provided this notice via email to their customers, but Sonic.net missed getting it into our MOTD a few days ago, when the information was released. I’m sorry about that! -Dane

Wed Mar 30 17:16:27 PST 2005 — Sonic.net announces firewalling for DSL connections.

I am happy to announce that Sonic.net will be providing firewall protection for DSL connections, beginning on April 12th, about two weeks from now. There are more and more threats to computers which are coming from the Internet, so I’m very pleased that we’re launching this exciting new feature for Sonic.net DSL customers!

Firewalling helps protect your systems from various Internet threats, including worms, viruses and spam relaying. In the next couple weeks, prior to the deployment, you are welcome to change the initial filtering level using our new DSL filtering configuration tool at: sonic.sonic.net/members/dslfilter/

Sonic.net’s DSL port firewalling features provide various levels of protection for DSL connected computers. By using one of the three levels of filtering, you can protect your systems from many common Internet threats. If you’d like to change from the default, we suggest that you to select a level of protection which is appropriate for your type of Internet usage and your understanding of system security. For most customers, the default setting will provide a good degree of protection with little or no impact on your ability to use a full range of Internet applications.

Three levels of filtering are available:

Option One: Complete Inbound TCP Firewalling. This firewall rule set prevents any inbound TCP connections from being established, protecting your system from most types of Internet attacks.

Option Two (the default, recommended by Sonic.net): Common Exploitable Port Firewalling. This is the default firewall rule set applied to DSL circuits. It blocks traffic on port 25 (SMTP email) both to and from a customers circuit to any mail servers other than Sonic.net maintained servers as well as preventing communication on ports used by common Microsoft services that are frequently exploited.

Option Three: Port 25 Firewalling. This firewall rule set only restricts traffic on port 25 (SMTP email) to and from a customers circuit to any mail servers other than sonic.net maintained servers. This is the minimum recommended rule set. This rule set generally prevents your computer from being hijacked and used to send SPAM directly to other mail servers.

Finally, we’ve always offered static IP addresses and we do welcome customers running their own servers on static IPs, so an option to turn off all filtering for those customers is available as well. We recommend that you only exercise this option if you run a mail server yourself on your DSL connection. Please do be careful with system security if you elect to turn off all filtering!

For more details on the specifics, please see our DSL Firewalling FAQ at: www.sonic.net/support/faq/advanced/dsl_firewalling.shtml

For discussions on this topic, please do read and post to the local discussion group at news://news.sonic.net/sonic.dsl

-Dane, Kelsey, Nathan, Chris, etc.

Wed Mar 23 13:46:37 PST 2005 — New Inbound Mail Servers. We added two new mail servers to handle MX services for inbound mail. The new servers will enable us to continue to make advancements in the quality of our MTA level SPAM, virus and phish blocking while also increasing the availability of our MX cluster. In order to properly utilize the new servers we’ve also updated the MX records for all of the domains that we are authoritative for. If we host MX services for a domain that we are not authoritative for users should update their zones to take advantage of the new servers. Any domain using us for mail should have the following MX records:

IN MX 10 mailin-01.mx.sonic.net. IN MX 10 mailin-02.mx.sonic.net.

Please direct any questions about the new MX servers to news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net -Kelsey and Augie