Wed Nov 15 11:31:57 PST 2000 — DSL Outage. We’ve just received word from our SBC (PacBell) reps that one of the DSLAMs in Sebastopol has failed. SBC has not provided us with an estimated time for it being fixed but has promised us an update in a few hours. Until DSL services are restored don’t forget that DSL users can still dial-up using their modems. – Dave, Chris & Kelsey

Wed Nov 15 10:32:37 PST 2000 — Night Operations. Thursday morning starting at 1:00AM we will be performing a series of upgrades to our network. First we will be installing an additional GB of RAM in typhoon, our news server, which will bring it’s total RAM to 2GB (thanks Ken!) There should only be a few minutes of downtime while we install the new RAM. This upgrade should result in a marked increase in Usenet performance.

We will also be removing one of the redundant modules in lily, our T3 mux, for service. There should be no downtime if the fail-over module properly takes over service. However, if it fails to take over properly, access to some of our pops may be unavailable while the mux resyncs and the T1’s come back online.

At 2:00AM we plan to finish the migration of all web data onto the new Netapp, icebox. For approximately 30-45 minutes all web data will be read-only while we do a final sync with the existing filer. Some CGIs may not function properly during this period and users will not be able to update any webpages or cgi. -Kelsey & Scott

Wed Nov 15 14:53:30 PST 2000 — Broadlink Maintenance. Thursday, November 16th at 11:59 p.m., BroadLink Communications will be performing scheduled maintenance on one of the tower site that provides wireless broadband service. Downtime is expected to be approximately ninety minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you experience degraded service levels outside this time frame please email Broadlink Support at support@broadlink.com – Broadlink Communications

Thu Nov 9 21:38:09 PST 2000 — File server space. Rather than buy new disks for the existing Network Appliance (NetApp), we bought an entirely new NetApp, which went online Tuesday. We anticipate putting it into production Sunday night/Monday morning.

One NetApp will serve web data, and the other will serve everything else. Further, the NetApps will be configured in such a way that, if one NetApp fails, the other will take over its file server chores. This scheme mirrors the redundancy already found in our web servers and mail servers; and indeed, it is the first step in propagating that redundancy throughout our network. (Please visit news:sonic.net for details.) -Scott

Thu Nov 9 17:51:21 PST 2000 — A small number of customers who use CGI scripts that write to the web filesystem could have experienced file corruption during the period of time in which Freezer was full. The NetApp has a handy snapshot backup feature, so if you were affected by this please read www.sonic.net/support/docs/backupdoc.html for restoral instructions. — Eli

Thu Nov 9 15:40:39 PST 2000 — Mail servers are back online, no mail was lost during this temporary down time. -Eli and Steve

Thu Nov 9 15:34:34 PST 2000 — Freezer, our main file server has filled up with data, we had to stop the mail servers to prevent mail from bouncing this will cause about a 10 minute delay in e-mail. Sorry for any problems this may have caused. -Eli and Steve

Sat Nov 4 18:10:37 PST 2000 — The zapcom.net web server suffered a fatal crash on November 2nd. We originally reported the data as “unrecoverable” — however, that turns out not to be the case. If any one needs data from that server, please email support@sonic.net. Thanks. -Scott and Steve

Thu Nov 2 23:06:35 PST 2000 — Altavista.com unreachable. The famous and wonderful search engine Altavista.com seems to be having trouble this evening. Moving routes between T3’s didn’t help, and a check from off of our network shows the same problem. -Scott

Thu Nov 2 15:23:58 PST 2000 — The zapcom.net web server suffered a fatal crash today. The data on this box is un-recoverable, so we will not be attempting to resuscitate this server. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us at support@sonic.net – Steve