Mon Dec 10 15:02:27 PST 2001 — We’ve expanded the focal hunt group by 15%. This will eliminate occasional busy signals on the ###-9811 dial pool. We have also replaced a PRI in the 522-1003 dialup pool, which returned an additional 23 dialup lines to service. -Steve

Mon Dec 10 13:53:38 PST 2001 — New email filtering tools. We are in the process of evaluating SpamAssassin for integration into our suite of email filters. For the past few weeks our early testers have reported good success with SpamAssassin and we feel that it is ready for more widespread testing by our users. To make it easier for our users to evaluate this too we’ve created a new membertool, ‘The SpamCan,’ which can be used to turn SpamAssassin on or off. The SpamCan can also be used to toggle some of our other email filters as well. We intended to have all of our email filters SpamCan enabled shortly.

SpamAssassin tags email which it believes to be spam by adding headers and by modifying the subject (which can be turned off) and then includes a detailed explanation of why the mail was tagged in the message body. SpamAssassin is fully user configurable; users are able to add whitelist and blacklists, as well as modifying scores and thresholds. In our own testing, SpamAssassin has demonstrated itself to be over %95 effective in correctly tagging spam. Users are then able to use procmail or mail filters built into their email clients to filter the tagged spam to a junk mail folder. We do not recommend deleting tagged messages.

Before enabling SpamAssassin on your account or if you have questions about it or any of our email filters please review the local newsgroup news://news.sonic.net/sonic.antispam and post your questions there. If you are currently using SpamAssassin inside of your own procmail.rc we recommend that you use our tools to turn it on or off instead. -Kelsey

Sun Dec 9 13:07:25 PST 2001 — Circuit failure on the 522-1003 hunt group caused ‘All circuits are Busy’ messages and fast busy signals this morning. After rebooting some of our gear the problem went away, we do have PacBell investigating on their end to see what caused the failure. -Steve

Sun Dec 2 01:11:57 PST 2001 — Night Operations Complete. We cleaned the switch’s configuration and rebooted without any trouble. Hopefully this will clear up some of the stability issues. -Kelsey and Matt

Sat Dec 1 22:08:33 PST 2001 — We will be rebooting ape, our core Extreme Networks switch tonight. It’s configuration has become corrupted, most likely over the course of software upgrades done in the past. EN believes that the corruption in the configuration may be the cause of some of it’s stability problems. We’ll bring the switch down shortly after midnight and total down time shouldn’t be more than 15 minutes. This procedure will take longer than a simple reboot because the switch must be brought up ‘dumb’ with a default configuration before the cleaned configuration can be applied to it. -Kelsey, Nathan and Matt

Sat Dec 1 17:44:31 PST 2001 — In a move that peripherally affects Sonic.net customers, Excite@Home cut off Internet access for AT&T Broadband cable modem customers on Saturday morning at about 2:15AM. With about 850,000 end-users affected, this is a major impact for broadband end-users. Included in these are cable modem customers in Petaluma and Windsor.

Here at Sonic.net, we’ve noticed a large decline in the amount of outgoing traffic, as @Home was one of the largest single consumers of content from sites hosted here. If you have your own website here, you may notice less traffic.

We have also had some user calls regarding websites which were hosted by @Home customers on their cable modem connections (side note – this isn’t allowed by the AT&T terms of service) which are now offline.

To check if a site that you cannot reach is on the @Home network, use our Ping/Traceroute/MTR tools at www.sonic.net/stats/. If the address is behind a router at “home.com”, and is unreachable, it’s likely that it is an AT&T cable modem customer who has been cut off.

AT&T has told customers that they can expect to be without service for “a few weeks” (CNet). Sonic.net has received DSL orders from some AT&T customers to replace their cable modem service, and we’re glad to be bringing these customers back online with us directly! -Dane

Wed Nov 28 10:30:07 PST 2001 — Hardware failure on the 522-1003 dialup group caused some intermittent busy signals. We have isolated the hardware and are in the process of replacing it. -Steve

Wed Nov 28 16:23:08 PST 2001 — One of our HyPer DSP cards in the XXX-9811 was configured incorrectly. After analyzing our connection logs and and seeing excessive 14.4kbps connections, we were able to locate the card and re-program it to behave more appropriately. -Steve and Russ

Mon Nov 19 17:24:09 PST 2001 — We have upgraded our mail servers to a new kernel (version 2.4.14) and are now running Network File System Version 3 (NFSv3). This should resolve the occasional corruption of mail boxes and increase overall system performance. -Russ and Kelsey

Sat Nov 17 00:43:25 PST 2001 — Night Operations Complete. Ape rebooted successfully without a hitch. Total downtime was less than 2 minutes. We also reinstalled the secondary MSM to restore the switch’s internal redundancy. -Kelsey and Matt