Wed May 16 15:19:40 PDT 2001 — Sonic.net is now offering Sun Netra X1’s on our leased colocation plan! For as low as $195 a month, you can colocate a Sun server with a 400 MHz UltraSPARC processor and from 128-512 Megabytes of RAM. For more details, see our sales page at www.sonic.net/sales/sun/
-Kevan
Wed May 16 14:16:13 PDT 2001 — We completed the upgrades of our local DNS servers yesterday afternoon. We now have three new dedicated DNS servers on our local network and are currently securing a facility for a fourth off-site server on the East Coast to increase the resiliency of our DNS services, especially in the event of network outages here at our NOC — or the West Coast in general.
The new DNS servers are considerably more responsive than the two old servers and have significantly more robust hardware beneath them. You may notice faster DNS resolution times and more responsive web browsing. We’ve published a brief white paper on the new DNS servers at www.sonic.net/network/ along with a link to our public network statistics. If you have any questions we’ll be happy to respond to them in news:sonic.net
-Kelsey
Tue May 15 18:24:51 PDT 2001 — A transient problem with our mail routing system caused e-mails to some address to be rejected for 1 hour and 20 minutes today.
The problem began at 11:47 A.M. and lasted until 1:06 P.M. affecting 101 specific addresses.
We will notify the individual senders and recipients by email so that they can re-send the messages.
-The Sonic Ops Staff
Sun May 13 03:18:42 PDT 2001 — Night Operations: Completed. Extreme Networks worked on site with us tonight to replace our core switch’s faulty MSM modules with two new MSMs. Both of the new MSMs appear to be fully functional: the switch now passes all of its diagnostics and boots without any errors. While we were installing and testing the new modules the switch was rebooted several times over a 30 minute period which resulted in intermittent network outages. Thanks for the help Dennis!
We also finished migrating sonic.sonic.net, or core administrative server and primary DNS server, from 208.201.224.11 to it’s new IP address. Now that 208.201.224.11 is no longer tied to sonic.sonic.net we are free to complete the migration to our new DNS server architecture.
-Kelsey, Scott, Chris, Nathan, and Dennis from Extreme Networks.
Thu May 10 13:05:06 PDT 2001 — ‘Homepage’ virus outbreak. We’ve got filtering in place for the latest Microsoft Visual Basic (.vbs) virus. For more information on the virus here is a link to Symantec’s website: www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/vbs.vbswg2.x@mm.html -Kelsey
Tue May 8 12:57:04 PDT 2001 — PacBell DSL equipment price reduction. Save $55 now on your DSL modem when you sign up for PacBell DSL. Formerly $253, the equipment price for new PacBell DSL service is now $198. More information and sign up at:
Tue May 8 14:35:27 PDT 2001 — We’ve added a link to our newly updated web based email interface to the home page. Look for the new “Web Mail” link in the navigation section of our home page. The web mail package can be used when you’re not at your usual PC and don’t want to make complex changes to configure an email client. It’s also got a set of powerful contact management and mailbox management features. Usenet news groups and scheduling are also included, and you can upload contact databases from other client software.
To shortcut directly to the web email login, you can use the URL:
For any questions about the web based email software, please read and post to the news:sonic.help.twig newsgroup. -Nathan and Dane
Sun May 6 03:21:58 PDT 2001 — Night Operations: Update. We ran into a few problems tonight. First, we had to postpone the updates to sonic.sonic.net until next week due to unexpected problems with some software licenses. Second, the replacement MSM failed in the switch the same way that the original one did. This indicates that the troubleshooting that we had done with our vendor incorrectly identified the cause of the failures. The switch was off-line for around 5 minutes while we restored it’s configuration. -Kelsey and Scott.
Fri May 4 16:59:10 PDT 2001 — Night Operations scheduled for Sunday May 6th a 1:00am. We will be working on our core administrative server, sonic.sonic.net, in order to prepare for some pending updates to our DNS servers. Normal network operations should not be affected by any of the work that we do on sonic. We will be also replacing the bad MSM in the ExtremNetworks BlackDiamond 6808 switch with a new MSM. Once the new MSM in installed and synced with the primary we will reboot the switch, an operation which only takes about 120 seconds. If the reboot fails we are already well versed in restoring the BlackDiamond’s configuration and will have the switch back online with the current MSM in less than 10 minutes. -The Ops Team.
Thu May 3 10:54:40 PDT 2001 — The night operations went well, the maximum down time was approximately 1 minute while the routing tables converged. -Steve and Scott.