Wed Nov 20 13:58:42 PST 2002 — All DSL customers back on-line. During the migration, we reached a maximum customer limit on our interface card which quietly stopped binding customers. The last 25 VP’s on the circuit were moved from the old circuit but not put into service by the router, causing approximately 261 customers to be left without connectivity. After further investigation, it was determined that our vendor shipped us the incorrect card type which couldn’t handle our configuration in its current form. A new card is being shipped, but in the mean time we have modified our configuration to work with the older card.

At this time, we believe that all DSL service has been restored. If you experience problems, please try power cycling your DSL bridge. If the problem persists, please notify technical support at 707-547-3400. -Sonic.net Operations Staff

Mon Nov 18 23:24:51 PST 2002 — SMS Reboot. The router which terminates DSL customers rebooted again this evening around 11:25pm. We will be upgrading the IOS when we bring up the OC3 on Wednesday morning which should resolve this issue. -Matt

Mon Nov 18 21:53:20 PST 2002 — CSU/DSU relocation. We will be relocating our external T1 CSU/DSU equipment on Wednesday between 1am and 3am during the ATM OC3 turn-up. This equipment serves Covad and fractional frame-relay customers as well as our ATG peering circuits. We expect less than 5 minutes of service interruption for those customers while we re-rack the equipment. -Matt

Sat Nov 16 10:11:20 PST 2002 — SMS Reboot. Yesterday, at around 12:30pm, the router that handles DSL spontaneously rebooted. This has happened in the past, and we are already working with Redback to fix the problem. We apologize for not entering this in the MOTD earlier. -Sonic.net

Fri Nov 15 11:30:10 PST 2002 — Mail Server Issues: Our mail server cluster experienced a brief failure this morning. We had a cascading failure which started in one of the SpamAssassin boxes and then led to failures on the mail server cluster, and then the other SpamAssassin box followed suit. During this time, most email handled by our system was unaffected, however some mail may have bounced and pop sessions may have failed to complete properly. At this time all services have been returned to normal.

We are in the process of re-architecting our mail server cluster and are addressing this problem, and others, as we design the new system. Once completed, these kind of failures will hopefully be a thing of the past. -Kelsey and Scott

Fri Nov 15 10:01:33 PST 2002 — BIND vulnerabilities. The Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND) implements a DNS nameserver, and is the most popular name server on the planet. Sonic.net uses multiple versions of BIND to support name services. The Internet Software Consortium has just disclosed multiple vulnerabilities in multiple versions of BIND. For those of you running BIND, patches are available here:

www.isc.org/products/BIND/patches/

Sonic.net was on an early distribution list for the patches, which were received 10:30pm Tuesday night, and were applied and running by 11:30pm Tuesday night. Thus, Sonic.net’s vulnerable BIND installations have been secured for over two days already. -Scott and Kelsey

Fri Nov 15 18:30:16 PST 2002 — Yet another kernel upgrade. It turns out that Wednesday’s kernel upgrades weren’t enough to combat the kernel bug. A new program was released about an hour ago on Bugtraq that was far more tenacious about killing a server. Fortunately, Linus Torvalds himself posted a kernel patch to the linux-kernel mailing list, which we applied to all vulnerable servers. Those servers are now no longer vulnerable. We don’t expect another problem with this security bug. -Scott

Wed Nov 13 17:19:20 PST 2002 — Kernels upgraded. Today we upgraded operating system kernels on all user-accessible hosts to combat a vulnerability to a Denial of Service attack. An exploit to this attack was posted to Bugtraq in the wee hours of the morning, and by noon, we had all vulnerable systems upgraded. -Scott and Kelsey

Tue Nov 12 20:18:57 PST 2002 — Intermittent busy signals on 1003. We experienced intermittent busy signals briefly on our 1003 dial group. We rebooted the offending PRI card and service has returned to normal. -Matt and Kavan

Tue Nov 12 13:26:09 PST 2002 — Sonic.net is releasing for beta trial our new Pop-Up ad blocker for Windows and Internet Explorer. The software will block annoying Pop-Up ads, as well as optionally block animated gifs and ShockWave Flash animations, which are often used in banner ads.

This is beta software, and if you download and install it, we would appreciate your feedback in the newsgroup news:sonic.net

The URL to download the installer is:

ftp.sonic.net/pub/FreeSurfer21026Sonic.exe

For users of Macintosh or Linux systems, we recommend Mozilla, which offers Pop-Up blocking in it’s configuration options. -Dane