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
Fri Oct 26 15:46:01 PDT 2001 — An issue with our phone system was causing some of our tech support numbers to report that they were disconnected between the hours of 6:00pm and 9:00am. We had a phone tech come out and take a look at our system and he fixed the problem. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused. -Steve and Jared G.
Sun Oct 21 20:46:17 PDT 2001 — We’ve been having some intermittent failures this afternoon of the connection between all of our PacWest xxx-0174 dialup numbers, which are terminated in Oakland and our main datacenter in Santa Rosa. We’re working now to diagnose the cause of the trouble and resolve it.
Meanwhile, our innovative double-pop architecture provides redundant dialup numbers for virtually every community. Local numbers can be found by selecting “Find Dialups” on our home page. We suggest you print the list for future reference in case of problems with the primary number you use. -Dane, Scott, Eli, Steve and Kavan
Update, Mon Oct 22 00:05:25 PDT 2001, Pacific Bell reports that they’ve got two OC-48 circuits (capable of carrying 64,512 voice calls, or 2688 T1 circuits, roughly) between Santa Rosa and Oakland that are taking a lot of errors. They have been working on this issue all day today, and the Pacific Bell network operations center describes this as their top priority. They have not yet found the fault, and do not have an estimated time of repair.
It’s now past midnight, utilization is very low, and we are providing backup numbers for virtually all locations via our “double-pop” configuration. The failure is intermittent, and connectivity is good most of the time. Use the “Find Dialups” tool from the home page to look for backup numbers for your area. We will keep you posted here when Pacific Bell wraps up repair. -Dane Update, Tue Oct 23 09:33:46 PDT 2001, Pacific Bell reports that the cut fiber has been repaired and all is well. The repair was completed around 6:30am on Monday morning.
Sat Oct 20 10:37:41 PDT 2001 — Currently, Sonic.net’s credit card transaction processing is unavailable. This prevents payment of renewals, new sign-ups, domain registrations, etc. We expect to have this resolved shortly, please try again later. -Dane
Update: Transaction processing is back online.
Fri Oct 19 08:26:11 PDT 2001 — We’ve got new quota monitoring tools online in the “Member Tools” area. Users over or projected to be over quota have received warning emails with a link to the tools. If you’re curious about your disk or bandwidth usage, see the member tools at:
-Nathan, Kelsey and Dane
Wed Oct 17 11:23:39 PDT 2001 — During the last couple of days we had to take down some of the capacity from our 522-1003 dialup pool and move it to the focal hunt group, this was a temporary measure which may have caused some intermittent busy signals when calling 1003. The capacity has been returned to the 1003 group, so the busy signals should be gone now. -Steve
Wed Oct 17 13:33:42 PDT 2001 — PHP4 server up for testing. We are running a new web server executable on thunder.sonic.net:81 (port 81). We would appreciate it if experienced web developers would test the heck out of it and report their results in news:sonic.net. Most especially, folks running php3 sites should test them on the new server if possible.
Unfortunately, we can’t at the moment try the server at yourdomain.com:81, as the load balancing switch doesn’t understand what to do with requests to port 81. (Hopefully we will have that capability shortly.) -Scott
Tue Oct 16 11:19:53 PDT 2001 — There was a short BroadLink outage in the southern Santa Rosa area, this outage lasted approximately 30 minutes while the BroadLink techs replaced a faulty power supply. -Steve
Mon Oct 15 16:15:03 PDT 2001 — Special offer for domain registration transfers: $15 for transfer and a year’s service.
Sonic.net is now offering domain name registration transfers as well as new registration services. By using Sonic.net’s registration services, you will have a single point of contact for customer service. We also offer much better prices than from the old “Network Solutions” monopoly registration services.
If you have an existing domain, we are offering a great deal for domain transfers. No matter when in the future your domain expires, we would like you to transfer it now to Sonic.net for only $15, which includes an additional year of registration services. For example, if you have a domain with Network Solutions or another registrar that expires a year from now, move it now to Sonic.net for only $15 and get an additional year. This is substantial savings over the $25-$35 yearly renewal rate from Network Solutions.
We are also offering free transfers or free registration for any new multihomed website. If you have been considering multihoming, this offer could save you from $15 to $50.
For more information and to transfer or register domain names, visit the domain tool at:
Sun Oct 14 15:07:49 PDT 2001 — We’ve seen a number of problem reports regarding the site ‘abebooks.com’. This site is not hosted here and has no affiliation with Sonic.net, but appears to be very popular! Apparently the ‘abebooks.com’ site admins did a recent DNS (domain name service) change to a new provider, and their previous ISP never removed their old DNS zone configuration file. This caused our name servers to continue to ‘believe’ the old name servers as authoritative, and retain the old information.
We’ve engineered a workaround for our customers, but this serves as an important reminder: If you move a domain, always tell your previous ISP about the change! -Eli, Chris, Kavan, Russ