Tue Oct 9 16:19:44 PDT 2001 — Some Pacific Bell ADSL customers in the Santa Rosa area are experiencing an outage this afternoon. Pacific Bell has not been very clear in explaining the outage, but it appears to affect only some Remote Terminal ‘Pronto’ customers on the Santa Rosa 157 OCD. We will advise with more details and an ETR as soon as Pacific Bell is forthcoming with some details.

Update: As of Friday, this trouble seems to have been cleared by Pacific Bell. -Eli, David

Mon Oct 8 18:13:36 PDT 2001 — With valuable consulting help from BroadLink, Sonic.net has completed deployment of our Santa Rosa downtown wireless roaming service. Now, you can use a laptop with a standard wireless PC Card to access the Internet via Sonic.net at high speed. The service works in restaurants and coffee shops around Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa, and is free for Sonic.net customers.

For more information, visit waves.sonic.net/.

-Matt and Dane

Fri Oct 5 11:45:19 PDT 2001 — When we upgraded our mail server software on bolt (shell) we introduced a bug that caused a small percentage of mail sent from bolt to get stuck in the queue.

We have replaced the mail server software with a new version and processed the old messages. Most were delivered, those that were undeliverable were returned to the sender.

In order to avoid this in the future we are implementing a warning system that will notify our OPS team in the event of excessively old messages or an excessive number of un-delivered messages in the queue.

We apologize for the inconvenience. -Russ

Thu Oct 4 20:55:14 PDT 2001 — Local mail and local web hosting down. This evening, our load-balancing switch died catastrophically — we had to go down and move all the cables from kermit to piggy, the backup hardware. The spare switch seems to be working fine. The only difference between the switches is the OS revision, which is newer on kermit, the switch that failed. We apologize for the inconvenience. -Scott, Kelsey, Dane, and Eli

Tue Oct 2 10:35:25 PDT 2001 — New .info registrations delayed. When the new .info top level domain (TLD) opened up at 1:00PM Pacific on October 1st, the traffic at the registrar was tremendous. So many people were trying to register new .info domains that they were forced to pull the plug due to system instability.

The .info registry should be starting up again soon, but we do not have a schedule at this time. As soon as they are back online, our tools will automatically begin taking new registrations. We will be updating the MOTD as we receive additional information.

Standard domain registrations (.com, .net & .org) have not been affected, and our October promotion offering two years free domain registration (a $50 value) is still available on these domains.

Update: OpenSRS and Afilias have projected that the registry _may_ re-open at 6:00PM Pacific today, October 2nd.

We apologize for the delay! -Chuck and the Sonic.net staff

Tue Oct 2 06:33:36 PDT 2001 — The UUNet T3 upgrade went smoothly this morning. We are now running at a full 45 megabits on our link to UUNet. -Steve

Tue Oct 2 18:23:10 PDT 2001 — Update on .info registrations. From our upstream, OpenSRS:

Real-time .info registration update: We have been advised by the .info registry operator (Afilias) that the emergency maintenance window will continue longer than originally anticipated. This means that no-one will be able to register or manage .info names until further notice. We have been informed that an announcement regarding resumption of normal registry operations will be made at around 09:00 EST (13:00 UTC) October 3rd. We will announce any further information as it becomes available.

We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause you.

Scott Allan, Director, OpenSRS

Update from OpenSRS: We have just been advised that an announcement regarding resumption of normal registry operations will now be made at around 13:00 UTC (09:00 EDT) October 4th. We will announce further information as it becomes available. The expectation is the registry will go real-time live at 14:00 UTC (10:00 EDT) on October 4th.

Charles Daminato, Tucows/OpenSRS Product Manager

Sonic.net’s tools are showing that .info is open, but I’m finding that in most cases, requests are timing out. It does not appear that they have resolved their technical problems yet, but do keep trying if you’ve got .info names that you want. Some Sonic.net customers have managed to get .info domains registered during times the registry has been up. -Dane

Tue Oct 2 16:58:10 PDT 2001 — While testing new URL filtering to block Nimda/Code Red requests, we partly broke our Alteon load balancing switch configuration. Our site at www.sonic.net was unavailable and users were unable to send and receive email for a few minutes. Multihomed sites were not affected, and no email was affected during this brief interruption. -Dane and staff

Tue Oct 2 15:05:20 PDT 2001 — This morning, we upgraded our backbone Internet connectivity speed by almost 60%. While our average link usage was well below the capacity of our links, we were noticing some intermittent latency during peak utilization times. The cost for a three to six megabit bandwidth upgrade was pretty close to that for a full 21 megabits, so we opted for the extra speed. Enjoy!

Statistics for routers and backbones links are available in our Cricket stats at www.sonic.net/stats/.

-Dane, Steve and staff

Tue Oct 2 15:04:13 PDT 2001 — We’ve had to reboot ape, one of our core switches. It was still switching, but would not route, which caused problems for colocated and DSL customers. Downtime was about five minutes. Our vendor recently released a new operating system for this switch which promises greater stability and additional features, and we’re planning an upgrade for the near future. -Staff