Tue Aug 10 10:09:00 PDT 2004 — Broadlink outage. The equipment that gateways Broadlink’s network into ours locked up last night about 3 AM. Service was restored at 8:20 AM. All Broadlink customers were affected. -John, Nathan and Jason

Mon Aug 9 17:52:15 PDT 2004 — In preparation for the beginning of the migration to the new web cluster, the testweb server is now using user’s real web data. We will be taking the testweb server off-line tomorrow morning. For more information, please see news://news.sonic.net/sonic.help.www -Kelsey and Nathan

Wed Aug 4 22:46:09 PDT 2004 — Short DS3 outage affects Santa Rosa dialup. We experienced a 20 minute outage tonight, starting at 10:20 PM, that affected the DS3 circuit to our SR2 POP that serves the equipment that answers the 707-522-1001 and -1002 dialup numbers. We believe it is probably a rarely occurring fault in the router port hardware, but we are watching it closely. -Nathan and John

Tue Aug 3 02:06:31 PDT 2004 — The ATM switch installation went smoothly with minimal downtime. The ATM switch should allow us to continue troubleshooting DSL performance problems as well as, hopefully, allowing us to resolve them. -Kelsey and Nathan

Mon Aug 2 15:06:53 PDT 2004 — Santa Rosa Redback work Monday night. We are going to be working on the DSL gateway equipment in Santa Rosa tonight at midnight. There may be a couple of brief interruptions in service as we insert our new ATM switch into the circuit from SBC. -Nathan and John

Tue Jul 27 17:30:13 PDT 2004 — Santa Rosa Redback reboot Thursday morning. We are going to reboot the Santa Rosa DSL gateway at 12:30 AM Thursday, July 29. Expected downtime for DSL customers served through this equipment is expected to be 15 minutes. This action is part of our ongoing process to correct some performance problems. -John and Nathan

Tue Jul 27 16:37:50 PDT 2004 — MTA Filter hiccup. We tripped over a bug in our custom MTA level RBL filter application resulting in no MTA level spam filtering when we rerouted list traffic through our MX servers this afternoon. The MTA filters have just been restored and Russ is busy fixing the bug in the software now. Hopefully with the recent SpamAssassin upgrade this failure went largely unnoticed. -Kelsey and Russ

Tue Jul 27 15:12:03 PDT 2004 — List server changes. Our new mailman list server is online and ready for action. Mailman is significantly more user friendly than majordomo and features intuitive web based management of list configuration and subscribers. Inbound list server emails have also been rerouted to pass through our MX cluster to provide spam and anti-virus filtering for lists.

The new list server also signals the discontinuation of support for majordomo. All users with majordomo lists will receive an email with detailed instructions on how to migrate their existing list to the mailman in the next few days. Once the active lists have been migrated our majordomo server, afterburner, which has been in service since April 22, 1997, will be decommissioned.

New mailman lists can be created and managed through the updated list tool in the member tools. For more information please see news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net and mailman.sf.net

-Kevan, Chris B., and Kelsey

Mon Jul 26 13:47:51 PDT 2004 — We’ve upgraded SpamAssassin! The long awaited SpamAssassin upgrade has been completed!

Currently, we are running a 3.0 pre-release version which we will upgrade when 3.0 goes gold. Even this pre-release version has already proven to be more effective at catching the spam that makes it through our suite of MTA level filters.

There are a few important changes that have been made to SpamAssassin and it’s integration into our tools. By default, SpamAssassin now re-encapsulates any tagged messages as an attachment to the spam report. This behavior can be modified with the SA tool in the member tools which has also been updated with a number of new features. In order to maximize the new version’s performance, we’ve reset everyone’s configuration to the new default but have left any whitelists or blacklists alone.

For more information or to report any problems, please see news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam

-Kelsey and Chris B.

Mon Jul 26 13:29:37 PDT 2004 — Sonic.net filters new virus. A new variant of the MyDoom virus started hitting Internet users recently. It harvests email addresses from the victim machine and sends messages that purport to be from the recipient’s Internet Service Provider. Sonic.net is filtering this virus now, so our customers won’t spread the virus. But you may have seen some strange message before the filtering took effect. It is also reported that this virus is causing problems for search engines like Google because it also searches for email addresses matching the domain of an address found on the victim machine.

For more information, see this link: www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.mydoom.m@mm.html

-Sonic.net Support and Operations departments