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

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