Tue Aug 5 17:27:08 PDT 2003 — Night Operations: Tomorrow at 01:00AM we are going to be working on one of our Cisco 7500 customer routers, finishing its complete reconfiguration. This will be an invasive night-ops, and customers accessing our network through this router — which includes customers using our Sebastopol, Santa Rosa (2), and Oakland POPS — may lose connectivity briefly. -Kelsey and Nathan

Sun Aug 3 22:52:24 PDT 2003 — A large scale denial of service attack knocked out a large portion of our network until we were able to get control of the traffic. The DoS started shortly after 10:00 PM. – Network Operations

Sat Aug 2 14:08:27 PDT 2003 — Busies on 1001. Our point-of-presence that serves all -1001 numbers was experiencing busy signals a few minutes ago. We rebooted the recalcitrant gear, and all seems well now. -Matt, Russ, and Scott

Fri Aug 1 16:07:36 PDT 2003 — A number of our customers have received an email with the return address ‘admin@sonic.net’, claiming that ‘your email address is about to expire’ and containing a .zip file as an attachment. The attachment contains the W32/Mimail@MM virus: us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=100523 Needless to say, this message did not originate from Sonic, and should be deleted. We started filtering for the virus on our mail servers shortly after we discovered the scope of the issue. – Eli, Operations

Thu Jul 31 22:31:59 PDT 2003 — Some Broadlink customers may experience high latencies. All customers off the Mt. Barham Tower Site (005), Sector 4 are going to get very high latencies that will produce connection drops and unresponsive connections. Looks like a bad antenna or connection to that sector’s antenna.

Jason had been watching the deterioration and went to the site to replace gear in the equipment room (ground level bunker) today. Those changes made no effect.

We got a certified tower climber scheduled to go up at 7:30 AM tomorrow, Friday, August 1, 2003. -Tim

Thu Jul 31 10:15:23 PDT 2003 — Webstats for the 28th failed to run due to the nightops on the 29th. Unfortunately the raw weblogs were rotated away before we had a chance to re-run the stats. -Sonic.net Operations

Tue Jul 29 23:33:09 PDT 2003 — Altnews.sonic.net was offline for a few hours this afternoon due to some hasty changes in the providers network that had not propagated to our servers yet. -Kelsey

Tue Jul 29 18:33:41 PDT 2003 — We are seeing some times when all connections to the NNTP server supernews.sonic.net are in use. Customers are reminded to please only maintain one connection at a time to this server; do not open multiple connections, as the available streams must be shared by other customers.

In addition, we offer two other news servers, news.sonic.net, which is best for text, and altnews.sonic.net which has un-capped speed – it’s faster than Supernews!

In summary, our preferred NNTP news server for non-text content is altnews.sonic.net due to it’s speed and large number of available ports. -Dane

Tue Jul 29 03:06:07 PDT 2003 — Night Operations Complete: We completed significant house work on two of our routers, cleaning out over 35k of outdated configuration. The SQL server upgrade went without a hitch and we also moved ssl.sonic.net to our new distribution gear. -Kelsey and Nathan

Mon Jul 28 23:00:20 PDT 2003 — Night Operations: Tonight starting after Midnight we are going to perform maintenance on two of our routers. We don’t anticipate any service interruptions will be caused by the work. We are also going to migrate our internal SQL server to new hardware: membertools will be unavailable during the migration. Our apologies for the short notice. -Kelsey and Nathan