Tue Oct 21 10:28:46 PDT 2003 — Multicast and IPv6 outage. The router that handles Sonic.net’s multicast and IPv6 traffic locked up this morning and required a power cycle to restore. This event caused a multi-hour outage for these services. -John and Nathan

Thu Oct 16 15:24:25 PDT 2003 — E-Mail Anti-Virus Progress: Our new Anti-Virus filtering solution is working quite well at this time. Initially we encountered some stability and configuration issues that we’ve been able to resolve. The filters blocked 27,964 infected E-Mail’s from reaching our customers yesterday. Many of these viruses would not have been caught by our old, hand maintained filters.

In response to the good results, we’ve moved the new system onto the outbound mail cluster that handles ‘mail.sonic.net’ so our outbound mail flows from customers will also be cleaned. -Kelsey

Sun Oct 12 17:13:21 PDT 2003 — Issues with SpamAssassin Cluster: Two of the four dedicated SpamAssassin processing servers started to fail open at 6:00 PM last night due to a debugging log which reached the 2 gigs file size limit on both boxes, nearly simultaneous. The verbose debug log has been disabled on all of the servers and the two servers have been returned to service. The failure was not detected by our monitoring since the servers were accepting connections but were unable to complete the requests. -Kelsey

Thu Oct 9 17:26:41 PDT 2003 — Issues with new Anti-Virus Filters: Our new anti-virus filter may have caused some MIME multipart/alternative messages to loose their text/html part, but only when a text/plain part was present. We resolved this earlier this afternoon after it was brought to our attention by a couple of users. We are sorry for any trouble or confusing this may have caused. So far, our beta results have been very promising. The new filters have caught over 24,000 viruses so far today, many of which were most likely not caught by our old virus filters. -Kelsey

Wed Oct 8 15:46:27 PDT 2003 — New National Access dialup provider. We are pleased to announce that we are switching National Access providers. By the end of October we will discontinue using MegaPOP. We are now displaying GlobalPOPs phone numbers in our pop finder page. They have over twice as many access numbers as our old provider. If you use this service, please check the web page and find the new access numbers. www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl -John and Kelsey

Tue Oct 7 12:39:18 PDT 2003 — Upgrade to “tin” didn’t go so well. Folks have been reporting problems with the new “tin”, so we have gone back to running the old version when one types “tin” (or “tin.old”). “tin.new” runs the new version.

Also, a reminder that almost all customer data is backed up in .snapshot directories — for instance, if you have a file in your .tin directory that you need restored, cd to .tin/.snapshot and select a backup.

We didn’t expect the new tin to be fraught with problems, and apologize for any trouble the upgrade may have caused. Please report tin problems in news:sonic.net. Thank you. -Scott

Mon Oct 6 11:58:27 PDT 2003 — Upgrade to “tin” newsreader on Shell. The shell server now sports the absolute latest version of “tin”. Our version of tin has a disabled mail check, as it doesn’t understand maildir, the new format of our mail spools. (If you don’t know what a shell server is, you can safely ignore this update.) -Scott

Mon Oct 6 14:31:38 PDT 2003 — Our new E-Mail anti-virus solution is currently being tested on one of our inbound MX servers. If the system proves to be stable under the real world load presented we will deploy it on the rest of our mail servers in a few days. It should be noted that at this time there is no way for a user to optionally bypass the new anti-virus software. Users will not be able to bypass the filtering on outbound email, but if there is demand, we will consider allowing users to disable inbound virus filtering on their accounts. -Kelsey

Fri Oct 3 23:13:32 PDT 2003 — Network Event: We experienced significant packet loss on our circuit to Equinix tonight due to a possible fiber cut in San Jose. After shutting down the link to prevent poor performance one of the core routers at one of our San Francisco POPs rebooted due to an apparent software bug. This, of course, confounded any problems caused by the other trouble. All services has been restored at this time, both the San Francisco POP at Focal and Equinix are at 100%. -Kelsey and Nathan

Wed Sep 24 15:04:27 PDT 2003 — Testing New Email Anti-Virus Solution: We are currently testing a new anti-virus solution on custmx.sonic.net, our dedicated backup MX servers for customers with their own mail servers. If the test goes well we will deploy the system on both our inbound and outbound mail servers. The new anti-virus solution is based on MIMEDefang and Clamav which are both open source projects.

If you have any questions or comments, please bring them to news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net -Kelsey