Fri Dec 17 11:07:54 PST 2004 — problems with dial-up numbers ending in 9606. Equipment failure caused connectivity problems on dial-up numbers ending with 9606. The equipment was rebooted and is now working properly. – Russ

Fri Dec 17 17:00:54 PST 2004 — DSL Problems in Stockton. Our network provider in Stockton where our DSL termination equipment is colocated is currently experiencing significant packet loss. They have been informed and will have the trouble resolved shortly. -Kelsey, Nathan

Thu Dec 16 10:15:44 PST 2004 — Internal Packet Loss. Last night we discovered some rather severe packet loss in our server backend SAN network that affected a number of hosts. In particular, two of our SpamAssassin servers and both FTP servers were affected by this loss. This may have exhibited in problems using our FTP servers and some mail messages not being filtered by SpamAssassin. The other hosts affected by the problem do not support public services. We resolved the problem this morning when we found one of the SAN switches was flopping back and forth between it’s primary and secondary uplinks to the other switches. -Kelsey and Nathan

Wed Dec 15 17:21:31 PST 2004 — Kernel Security Updates. We are upgrading the Linux kernels on all of our production servers to resolve two recently announced kernel exploits. While each server is rebooted some customer may notice small server outages while the clusters failover. -Kelsey, Scott, and Kevan.

Wed Dec 15 16:24:49 PST 2004 — Mail Issues. For a short time yesterday a small percentage of mail was incorrectly rejected due to being on the SBL spamhaus.org RBL. We disabled the use of this RBL in our MTA filters so we could track down the problem which appears to either be a bug in our custom software or our internal DNS servers. It was not due to hosts being incorrectly listed in the SBL. This only affected people using the SBL to filter their inbound mail – part of our default filter set – and did not affect anyone who had specifically turned it off. We’re going to re-enable the SBL once we’ve added some additional checks to our code. -Kelsey, Russ and Kevan

Wed Dec 15 15:28:40 PST 2004 — PHP upgrade on new web cluster. The new web cluster has been upgraded to PHP 4.3.10 which addresses some security issues present in earlier versions. The upgrade went smoothly and there was no interruption in service. -Kevan

Wed Nov 24 15:26:59 PST 2004 — More Kernel Updates. We’ve identified a bug in the 2.4.28 linux kernel’s arp subsystem that causes some significant problems during the booting of our servers. While we continue to track down this bug we’ve back ported the security updates to 2.4.27. Unfortunately this means we have to reboot a large number of servers again. -Kelsey, Augie, Kevan and Nathan.

Tue Nov 23 17:35:43 PST 2004 — Kernel Security Updates. We are in the process of upgrading the Linux kernels on most of our servers to resolve a potential security problem. Thanks to clustering of our major services these upgrades usually go unnoticed; however, we’ve had a increased call volume in response to some minor issues associated with the reboots. –Kelsey and Augie

Fri Nov 12 12:51:05 PST 2004 — Domain Locking FAQ. It has come to our attention that misleading notifications are being mailed to domain name owners regarding new ICANN policy and domain registration transfers. These notifications warn that malicious interlopers can assume control of domain names without confirmation from the domain’s rightful owner unless a registration lock is put in place. These notices are based upon a misinterpretation of new policies going into effect on November 12, 2004 which should have no adverse impact on the security of your domains. More information is available at sonic.net/support/faq/advanced/domain_locking.shtml online. Please disregard messages encouraging you to purchase or otherwise enable registration locking services. — John F

Thu Nov 11 10:52:23 PST 2004 — Cluster migration note for cgi-bins. If you don’t know what a “cgi-bin” is, please disregard this notice — if you do, please read on. This effects anyone running cgi-bin’s on the new web cluster, including folks running cgi-bin’s on www.sonic.net.

The new web servers’ environment is not hospitable to very old programs. cgi-bin’s compiled many years ago may need to be recompiled to work properly on the new web cluster. If you need to recompile a cgi-bin, and are having trouble doing so, please post to the Sonic.net newsgroup news://news.sonic.net/sonic.help.www We apologize for any inconvenience. -Scott