Fri Jul 23 17:55:31 PDT 2004 — Sonic.net will be closed for our 10th anniversary party, Sunday the 25th of July.

Thanks everyone for a wonderful decade in business! It’s been wonderful and fun for me, Scott and the rest of the team. Thanks very much to the customers, and also to the staff, present and past, for all your support. From the registry:

Domain name: SONIC.NET Record created on 26-Jul-1994.

Technical support will be closed on Sunday July 25th for an all day 10th anniversary staff and family party. I hope this doesn’t present much inconvenience for customers – please call us Monday for assistance, and we’ll be pleased to help.

Thanks, everyone! -Dane Jasper

Fri Jul 23 17:38:19 PDT 2004 — Santa Rosa DSL performance problems. Some of our customers served from our Santa Rosa DSL gateway are seeing performance problems, such as increased packet latency and packet loss. We are collecting as much diagnostic information as possible in order to isolate the cause of the problems.

At this time we believe that there are two separate issues at work. The first is backbone network congestion to some destinations. This problem should be greatly alleviated if not solved as the first major parts of our network rebuild come on-line. A DS3 (45 Mbps) circuit between our two San Francisco POPs will turn up on Monday, relieving some congestion on our Santa Rosa to 200 Paul, SF, link. Then later next week we will be able to take delivery of the gigabit Ethernet circuit that will eliminate that congestion.

The other issue is with performance of the Santa Rosa DSL gateway. Even though we are within published specs, we are seeing certain problems with the ATM port. The manufacturer has recommended that we reduce traffic on it. To that end we are working on acquiring an ATM switch to put in front of the gateway to split the existing traffic onto two separate ports on the gateway. If the manufacturer is correct, this will take care of this issue.

If you are one of the affected customers, we are sorry for the inconvenience. Please know that we take our network performance seriously and are working to take care of these issues as soon as possible. -John, Dane and Network Operations

Thu Jul 22 14:32:10 PDT 2004 — Customer T1 outages in San Francisco. We are experiencing an outage of the facility carrying customer T1 circuits into our San Francisco POP. We expect this to be repaired and back into service by 3pm. -John, Zeke, Jared and Sonic.net Operations

Tue Jul 20 23:21:52 PDT 2004 — Short Stockton DSL outage Wednesday night. The company that hosts our POP in Stockton is doing some work Wed. night, 7/21/04, from 11 pm to 1 am that will cause an outage for our Stockton area DSL customers. The expected downtime is 15 minutes sometime during that period. -John

Mon Jul 19 15:47:14 PDT 2004 — Newscene.com maintenance window. On Thursday, July 22, Newscene.com will be performing maintenance on newscene.sonic.net. Expected downtime is 60 minutes, and the work will start at some time between 11am and 3pm PDT.

This only affects customers with newsreaders that use newscene.sonic.net. -Scott

Fri Jul 16 16:17:19 PDT 2004 — New web cluster’s test data changed slightly. As announced, we have mass-updated all Berkeley DB files in the new web cluster’s test volume. We then tested the results with a previously-installed “Movable Type” blog installation, which worked as expected.

We then emailed all detected users of Berkeley DB files on our web servers. Web sites can be tested at testweb.sonic.net — please respond with your experiences at news://news.sonic.net/sonic.help.www . Thank you. -Scott and the Sonic.net Operations crew

Tue Jul 13 18:02:03 PDT 2004 — Packet Loss from Santa Rosa to San Jose. Our 100mbit circuit from Santa Rosa to San Jose is experiencing substantial packet loss. We are working with the provider of the circuit and hope to have the situation resolved shortly. -Kelsey and Nathan

Update Tue Jul 13 20:20:25 PDT 2004: Service is fully restored. The carrier reports a piece of equipment in Mountain View failed. Technicians were dispatched and the gear was repaired shortly after 8:00pm.

To prevent issues such as this in the future, we started construction of a new gigabit-speed fiber optic ring connecting our Santa Rosa headquarters, San Francisco, and San Jose approximately 4 months ago. This ring, scheduled for completion by the end of September, will enable us to withstand single circuit outages between these POPs without any service degradation. Also on order is a new link connecting both of our San Francisco POPs. Once these upgrades are in place, all of our major points of presence will be fully redundant. -Nathan and the rest of Sonic.net Operations

Tue Jul 13 14:10:56 PDT 2004 — New web cluster online for testing. Since Friday afternoon, we have been pointing testweb.sonic.net at the new web cluster — so far, so good.

We are currently preparing emails to be sent out to various classes of web server users, including those who use cgi-bin, Microsoft FrontPage, and Berkeley DB. As we draw nearer to deployment, we would encourage web server users to test their sites at testweb.sonic.net and let us know how it goes in news://news.sonic.net/sonic.help.www . Thank you. -Scott, Kelsey, Nathan, and the rest of Operations

Fri Jul 9 13:45:22 PDT 2004 — Web server testing continues apace. We are continuing to test our new web servers, which may result in occasional outages to “testweb.sonic.net”.

We hope to have the “testweb” name swung over to the new cluster later today, so that folks can test the cluster this weekend. -Scott, Kelsey, Nathan, and the rest of Operations

Tue Jul 6 12:05:17 PDT 2004 — New web server test continues. We are continuing to test our new web server environment at testweb.sonic.net . Already, we have found some differences in the php environment between both servers that needed to be addressed, as well as installed a mysql support module for Perl.

So far, we have had very little comment about the new web server environment. If you are concerned about the up-and-coming web cluster, working with your data, we would encourage you to try the new server at testweb.sonic.net and tell us what you think in news://news.sonic.net/sonic.help.www (in the thread announcing the new web server). We would especially appreciate reports about the FrontPage 2002 extensions. Thanks! -Scott, Kelsey, Nathan, and the rest of Operations