Fri Jan 7 17:16:45 PST 2005 — Kernel Security Updates. All public access servers have been patched against the recently announced local root exploit in the Linux kernel. -Kelsey, Nathan and Scott

Fri Jan 7 15:28:21 PST 2005 — Datacenter power work Tuesday, 1/11/05. PG&E will be replacing the transformer for our building at 8 AM Tuesday. We are renting a generator to provide power to the building during the work period. Customers should see no change in service during this work. The datacenter itself is on UPS, and if the rental generator fails, our own standby generator will take over. Our tech support systems have their own UPS’s, so those friendly folks can always be there to help. -Russ and John

Fri Jan 7 15:22:35 PST 2005 — Colocation UPS enhanced. Today we added a second, parallel battery string to the UPS that serves our Santa Rosa datacenter. This doubles our backup run time, and eliminates a single source of failure that caused problems in the past. -Russ and John

Mon Jan 3 11:32:52 PST 2005 — News Feed Issues. Early yesterday afternoon our internal news feeder server started to reject all posts due to a file system problem. This was not picked up by our monitoring. When we discovered it through some user reports early this morning we restored services for a couple of hours until it failed again. All of the problems were resolved at 10:50 AM. This failure will result in gaps on news.sonic.net as well as the potential loss of outbound posts. This only affected news.sonic.net and not supernews.sonic.net or newscene.sonic.net which were both available and fully functional. -Kelsey

Sun Jan 2 22:20:28 PST 2005 — Sluggish performance on some dialup connections. Some customers reported poor connectivity when dialing into one of our POPs. Rebooting the access servers has corrected the problem. The affected POP serves Sonic.net access numbers ending with 3, other access numbers were not affected. -Nathan and Russ

Mon Dec 27 11:10:00 PST 2004 — In part of San Francisco, SBC-ASI is having an ATM outage which may be affecting a small number of Sonic.net customers. SBC-ASI is aware of the issue, and is working to repair it now. -Dane

Mon Dec 27 10:16:10 PST 2004 — DOS Attack. We just had another short lived DOS attack targeting one of our colo customers. The magnitude of attack was far less than the last attack and only other colo customers connected to the same access switch should have been directly affected. -Nathan, Zeke and Kelsey

Mon Dec 27 16:39:13 PST 2004 — SpamAssassin Upgrades. We upgraded SpamAssassin to version 3.0.2 this afternoon. This upgrade should clear up some occasional problems we’ve had on the dedicated SpamAssassin servers as well as increase it’s accuracy at properly tagging spam. We are currently blocking roughly 56% of all inbound email with or user configurable MTA level RBL filters. SpamAssassin marks roughly another 55% of the remaining messages as spam and routes them to our graymail interface. All users can update their settings for both the MTA filters and SpamAssassin in the membertools. -Kelsey

Sat Dec 25 06:38:27 PST 2004 — DOS Attack. Starting at 5:52am and ending at 6:07am we experienced a relatively large DOS attack. Customers may have noticed some packet loss and latency to parts of the Internet during that window. The attack has stopped, and we’ll be monitoring our network closely for further signs of attack. -Nathan

Thu Dec 23 15:30:52 PST 2004 — Update on DSL problems in Santa Rosa. We are going to reboot and replace the malfunctioning interface with a spare at 15:40 PST today. This, unfortunately, is our best option to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Total downtime should be a few minutes at most unless we encounter an unexpected problem. -Kelsey, Nathan, Zeke, Jared, Dane and John