Thu Aug 14 15:50:43 PDT 2003 — Northeastern United States power outage. Cities affected include New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Toronto, Ontario; and Ottawa, Ontario. The power outage occurred at around 4:20 p.m. Eastern.

On the Internet, we have seen some small East Coast web and mail servers become unresponsive due to this event. Most large websites and services are hosted in colocation facilities with power backup, so this hasn’t caused a very significant impact online.

In the real world, in New York city, cellular providers are offline, people are trapped in subways and elevators, and they’re having a heat wave. Streets and bridges are packed with people, walking home from work. It’s a mess. -Dane

Tue Aug 12 12:37:13 PDT 2003 — Sonic.net is portscanning our IP ranges for open port 4444, which may be an indication that a system is infected with the Microsoft Blaster worm. FYI, in case your firewall logs note this portscan. -Dane, Nathan and Eli

Tue Aug 12 17:31:05 PDT 2003 — Intermittent busies: A failure in one of the 8 load-balanced access routers at our primary dialup POP caused intermittent busy signals on some of our access numbers. The router has been rebooted and is now working properly. -Russ

Mon Aug 11 13:58:30 PDT 2003 — Blaster worm. A new Internet worm, called “blaster”, is currently spreading throughout the Internet. Information about this worm can be found at:

www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.blaster.worm.html

The worm is designed to exploit a known DCOM RPC vulnerability using TCP port 135. This is a vulnerability affecting computers running Microsoft Windows. Information about the vulnerability can be found at:

www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-026.asp The recommended action is for all users of all versions of MS Windows to Update their software as soon as possible. We have had reports that users of Windows XP may experience difficulty in dialing up due to the traffic being generated by this worm’s activity; turning on the Internet Connection Firewall provided with XP should make it possible to dial up.

While Sonic.net is not blocking port 135 at this time, we may find it necessary to do so in the future. If you use applications that require traffic over TCP port 135 you might wish to explore switching to an alternate port. -Chris, Scott, Nathan and Support

Fri Aug 8 20:28:01 PDT 2003 — Sebastopol POP Maintenance: Tomorrow morning at 8:00AM our Sebastopol POP, which serves (707) 823-8812, will go offline while its UPS is serviced. We hope the outage will be brief but, the worst case is that it may take up to an hour before the POP will be back online. Customers are encouraged to use the pop finder to find another local access number in their area if needed. The pop finder is available at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl -Network Operations

Thu Aug 7 15:18:53 PDT 2003 — Broadlink emergency maintenance. They are currently doing work on one of their tower sites, and this has created some brief interruptions. -Dane

Wed Aug 6 17:16:30 PDT 2003 — Router Failure: The router which handles the circuit to our Focal POP in San Francisco had a VIP crash. Service is now restored. During the brief outage, dial-up and dedicated customers served from the Focal POP lost connectivity back to our main datacenter and servers. -Network Operations

Wed Aug 6 15:38:22 PDT 2003 — New Direct Peer with ATG. We’ve brought our direct peer with ATG back online and are exchanging local traffic. The peer should improve performance for our mutually connected customers. Thanks to the folks at ATG for helping to make this possible. -Network Operations

Tue Aug 5 12:13:20 PDT 2003 — Network Event: Some routine work on one of our gigabit ethernet storage network switches went awry and triggered a cascading failure of our mail and spamassassin servers. Some users may have received authentication failures or other errors while checking email. While the event was in progress we disabled processing of inbound email by spamassassin to decrease our recovery time. User’s ability to send mail was not affected. -Kelsey and Nathan

Tue Aug 5 12:08:47 PDT 2003 — Sonic.net license plate frames available. Stop by our office to install a “Work – Play – Surf .. Sonic.net” plate frame on your car. They’re free, it just takes a minute or two, and we’ve got a tool kit that you can use for the installation. Thanks for supporting Sonic.net! -Dane