Tue Jun 24 03:09:55 PDT 2003 — Night Operations Complete. All maintenance went as planned. No reboot of the SMS was required. Shell.sonic.net is running on the new switch, alot of patching has been replaced and alot of servers are running new kernels. -Kelsey, Nathan and Kevan

Mon Jun 23 12:24:23 PDT 2003 — Mail server upgrades: At 1:00PM we are migrating ‘mail.sonic.net’ to our new cluster. The new servers add support for STARTTLS, SSL encryption for SMTP. The primary reason for supporting STARTTLS is to allow for the encryption of username and passwords for customers that are using SMTPAUTH. It also has the advantage of encrypting mail while in transit to our servers and from our servers to remote SMTP servers that also support STARTTLS. We do not anticipate significant customer impact with this move, however it is possible that some mail clients may encounter trouble. If you have any trouble sending mail, please contact support. -Kelsey, Nathan and Russ

Mon Jun 23 12:16:19 PDT 2003 — Mail server problems: A configuration error caused our mail servers to briefly refuse mail from some of of our customers. Some users got error messages when trying to send Mail. No incoming mail was affected and no mail was refused without the sender receiving an error message. The problem was corrected within a few minutes – Russ

Mon Jun 23 19:59:56 PDT 2003 — Night Operations: Tonight, starting at 1:00AM, we will be working on our SMS 1800 in Santa Rosa as well as on some other routine projects. Most notably, we will be re-provisioning shell.sonic.net’s network to a different L3 distribution switch. Shell services will be briefly unavailable during the transition. -Kelsey, Nathan and Kevan

Fri Jun 20 12:27:55 PDT 2003 — FormMail now sends only to local addresses. To reduce its utility to spammers, the shared copy of FormMail installed on our webservers has been modified to only send to email addresses at Sonic.net hosted domains. If you need FormMail to send mail to an off-site address, please consider installing your own copy of the script. A secure FormMail replacement can be found at: nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/scripts.shtml

Wed Jun 18 15:40:01 PDT 2003 — SMS updates: At 1:00am Tuesday morning we will be performing updates to our Redback SMS 1800 in Santa Rosa. This unit serves both DSL and FRATM customers. Although the maintenance should not affect its operation, there is a possibility that we may be forced to reboot the device. -Kelsey and Nathan

Fri Jun 13 09:42:02 PDT 2003 — Maintenance on Stockton DSL 6/17/03. Sonic.net and Inreach will be doing a minor network change on Tuesday, at 5 am. SBC DSL customers in the Stockton service area will have a less than 5 minute outage. -Nathan, Andy and John

Update: Maintenance is complete. Downtime was approximately 2 minutes. -Nathan and Andy

Wed Jun 11 10:53:48 PDT 2003 — SpamAssassin server failure. This morning we had several of our SpamAssassin servers lock up, causing the others to become overloaded. Rebooting the servers restored service. While they were down, you may have received unfiltered spam email. Our email system is designed to “fail open” so that no email is lost. -Kelsey, Matt and John

Fri Jun 6 16:24:19 PDT 2003 — DNS server upgrades completed. All three of our name servers have been updated with faster CPUs and additional RAM. These new machines should provide better performance and should also be more reliable than the old name servers. This upgrade may not resolve some of the periodic DNS resolution problems that stem from large inbound zone transfers; we are still seeking a long term resolution to this problem. We are also working on other DNS server upgrades. We hope to have deployed 4 authoritative non-recursive servers deployed at geographically diverse locations soon and will also be deploying caching name servers at our access POPs. -Kelsey

Thu Jun 5 11:27:34 PDT 2003 — Shell server bugfix. We corrected a minor configuration issue that was preventing /tmp on the shell server from getting cleaned on a regular basis. Files left in /tmp will now be removed after 7 days from their last modification time. -Kelsey and Nathan