Wed Nov 7 11:09:23 PST 2001 — Bandwidth quota charges. At 5pm yesterday evening, we ran the new bandwidth quota tool. Unfortunately, it appears that some folks had not received the previous warning, resulting in an unexpected charge for the extra bandwidth that they had used. Sonic.net recognizes the inconvenience of receiving a charge without warning; however, we also recognize that most of those billed should have had some idea that they would be over quota. However, Sonic.net wishes to retain the good will of its customer base — toward that end, we are applying a 50% good-will credit across-the-board for current bandwidth quota charges. Disk quota charges are unaffected, as folks over-quota have been warned about disk usage for months.

Please remember that the bandwidth quotas have always been a policy at Sonic.net, but we hadn’t implemented a procedure to collect for over-quota usage. This means that some users have been enjoying quite a bit of free bandwidth with their web hosting. There is bound to be contention as we implement the procedure for over-quota charges; hopefully the good-will credit will smooth the transition to the new system. -Scott, Jen, Kelsey

Tue Nov 6 19:55:33 PST 2001 — The new .biz domain names are going live tonight at 9pm PST. OpenSRS, the registrar Sonic.net partners with, experienced problems during the opening of the .info TLD and has notified us that they will not be taking registrations for the .biz TLD this evening because they cannot reliably handle the unusual load that new domain offerings put on their current system. We are in contact with OpenSRS and will keep you updated with information as it becomes available. We apologize for the delay! -Matt, Chuck and the Sonic.net Staff

Fri Nov 2 11:42:22 PST 2001 — Our MegaPOP number for Phoenix, AZ is returning ‘all circuits busy’ messages, and MegaPOP is working to resolve that issue. MegaPOP has not released an ETR, but repairs are expected later today. We apologize for any inconvenience. – Eli

Update: MegaPOP was able to resolve this issue and doesn’t expect further interruptions. -Matt

Fri Nov 2 16:20:38 PST 2001 — BroadLink has resolved some intermittent latency issues which were affecting customers in some areas. Firmware upgrades were made to some customers radios which were flooding the network and causing the problem. -Dane and BL

Thu Nov 1 02:11:19 PST 2001 — We’ve completed the firmware upgrade on the Extreme Networks. The upgrade actually required two reboots which took about three minutes each.

After the upgrade, our 200Mbps FD Etherchannel connections to the Alteon load balancing switch which serves our mail and web servers seems to have failed. We’ve backed up to a set of 100Mbps links, and the servers are available.

We’re going to take this opportunity to upgrade the internal backbone link between the primary Alteon and the core switch to gigabit Ethernet, which will address our issues with Etherchannel between the Black Diamond and the Alteon. Once we’ve got that working, we’ll be bringing online “hot”, a new Extreme Networks Summit switch. Once connected, we’ll move the servers from ape (the Black Diamond) over to hot. The move to Gig-E and deployment of hot should include only momentary interruption of web hosting services.

This architectural change allows us to resolve some issues in the Extreme and Alteon environment where the Alteon was acting as a load balancing switch between two vlans in ape. This type of back and forth of traffic was causing some confusion in the switches, and caused some headaches.

-Kelsey and Dane

Wed Oct 31 11:14:52 PST 2001 — We will be upgrading firmware on our primary core switch at 1AM Thursday morning. Downtime is expected to be two to three minutes while the switch reboots after the upgrade. The bug fixes in this release should resolve some of the instability that we’ve seen in the product which have caused downtime in the past. We’ll also be bringing our redundant management switch module back online for full “brain” redundancy in this switch.

Our huge Extreme Networks Black Diamond 6808 switch is the primary core switch here at Sonic.net, and much of our network is served by it. A redundant Extreme Networks switch serves one of the two primary Cisco 7206VXR routers, and parts of the network will be reachable during the upgrade, including T3 and some T1 customers. -Dane and Kelsey

Wed Oct 31 17:07:18 PST 2001 — Our October domain registration special expires tonight, so if you’re interested in securing a domain name under the special pricing, see the tools at:

sonic.sonic.net/members/domain_tool/

-Chuck and Dane

Tue Oct 30 09:39:14 PST 2001 — shell.sonic.net has been moved to our new shell server, newbolt.sonic.net. bolt.sonic.net points toward this system now as well, but please always use shell.sonic.net as the primary name for shell service.

The old shell server was halted last night at 12:30AM after we discovered that the ssh host key had changed, implying that the system may have been broken into. It’s been quarantined for forensic analysis, after which we’ll have a better idea of what occurred.

The new shell server is a massive system with dual Pentium III 1 Ghz CPUs, almost a gigabyte of RAM and fast new drives. If you have any software requests or discussions, please post to: news://news.sonic.net/sonic.net

Currently, ssh access to the shell server is available, but telnet and rlogin are currently locked. We expect to turn on rlogin access from our dialup terminal servers in the next hour or so. Telnet access will be turned on shortly, but we’re likely to eliminate it in the next few days in favor of ssh, at least from outside our local network. If you don’t currently have an ssh client such as putty or terraterm, now would be a good time to seek one out and install it.

Update: rlogin access (including shell dialup) is still in the works. We’re having some trouble integrating it into our authentication system. Shell dialup should be available in an hour or two.

Update: rlogin access from our dialup servers (dialup directly to shell) is available. -Dane, Kelsey, Eli, Scott and Steve

Tue Oct 30 00:47:42 PST 2001 — We have shutdown bolt.sonic.net due to some possible security concerns. Our new shell server, newbolt.sonic.net is fully operational at this time so please use it instead. Direct-dial shell accounts are disabled and will be reactivated in the morning. -Kelsey, Eli and Scott

Mon Oct 29 12:02:42 PST 2001 — With the shift to standard time, Sonic.net has moved our administrative office hours to 8am to 5pm PST.

Technical support continues to be available from 8am to 9pm weekdays, and 9am to 9pm on weekends. Support can process new user sign-ups, renewal payments and most other functions for our customers. -Dane, Jen and Eli