Sun Sep 3 01:43:54 PDT 2000 — Earthquake. That was a 5.2 earthquake epicentered 3 miles WSW of Yountville. More information can be found at the USGS: quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Maps/123-39.html Aftershock prediction information for this quake can be found at quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/QuakeAddons/nc51101203.afterwarn.html And finally, you can file a “Did You Feel It?” report with the Community Internet intensity map here:

pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/STORE/X51101203/ciim_form.html (You may want to wait a bit on that last link, as it appears to be impacted by other earthquake-feelers.) -Scott, Nathan, and Mitch

Sat Sep 2 16:59:19 PDT 2000 — SOLVED: High latency and packet loss on UUNet in San Francisco. As of 16:43 PDT, the high latency and packet loss on UUNet’s network in San Francisco has cleared. Our new Internet monitoring tool — “see” — detected the problem while monitoring the path from here to www.ora.com. Since most of our traffic to the Internet did not travel over the latent path, we didn’t expect customers to notice the problem (unless they were visiting www.ora.com, of course) — and from talking with Sonic.net tech support, it appears we received no calls about the problem. Here “see” has fulfilled its role of notifying us about potential problems before you, our customer, notice them. -Scott

Sat Sep 2 14:51:29 PDT 2000 — High latency and packet loss on UUNet in San Francisco. Our new Internet monitoring tool — “see” — has detected unacceptable latency and packet loss on UUNet’s network in San Francisco. Upon contacting UUNet, they informed us that they already have a ticket open on the problem. “See” detected the problem as part of its monitoring of the path from here to www.ora.com. Since most of our traffic to the Internet does not travel over the latent path, we don’t expect customers to notice the problem (unless you are visiting www.ora.com, of course). Here, “see” has fulfilled its role of notifying us about potential problems before you, the customer, notice them. -Scott

Fri Sep 1 08:35:03 PDT 2000 — One of our redundant mail servers lost contact with our authentication server, this would have caused some people to get an invalid password error when checking mail. This was discovered quickly and fixed. -Steve

Thu Aug 31 11:12:12 PDT 2000 — (Updated) BroadLink Communications will be doing radio work and upgrades that will affect customer links this evening (Thursday). Between 9:30pm and 11:30pm, amplifier upgrades will be performed on the tower site in South-East Santa Rosa. Customers may experience a very brief interruption of service while the equipment serving their sector is changed. Last night BroadLink replaced the microwave link between Sonic.net and the tower sites with a new 100Mbps optical link. -Dane and BroadLink

Wed Aug 30 17:38:59 PDT 2000 — BroadLink Communications will be doing radio work and upgrades that will affect customer links this evening. Between 6pm and 9pm, amplifier upgrades will be performed on the tower site in South-East Santa Rosa. Customers may experience a very brief interruption of service while the equipment serving their sector is changed. Later, at midnight, BroadLink will be replacing the current microwave link between Sonic.net and the tower sites with a new 100Mbps optical link. Downtime is expected to be about fifteen minutes while this change is made. -Dane and BroadLink

Mon Aug 28 20:47:06 PDT 2000 — Earlier tomorrow (Tuesday) morning, at 2am, we will be shutting down the Cable & Wireless T3 while we swap some interface cards on our core router. This may cause intermittent loss of connectivity to the Internet for a minute or so while the routes converge on our UUNet circuit. -Scott

Mon Aug 28 19:14:06 PDT 2000 — We’re working on a few bugs in twig, our new web based email, newsreading and productivity package. Some users have reported twig has moved their email from the inbox into a mailbox ‘mbox’, and then they can’t retrieve the same email with POP. We haven’t been able to duplicate this trouble internally yet, but we’re looking at it! -Dane and Scott

Mon Aug 28 18:54:45 PDT 2000 — We will be upgrading interfaces in the core router tonight around 1am. This should not result in any interruption of services, as all the interfaces are hot swap. We will be taking the Cable & Wireless T3 offline for a little while during this upgrade, but we will leave the UUNet T3 online, so this should not affect customer Internet access. The upgrade includes testing of a new UUNet T3, plus the installation of a new channelized T3 card for serving customer T1 circuits.

As a side note, our new T1 service offering will allow us to provision true point to point full T1 circuits to customers in and near Santa Rosa for a total delivered cost of $999/mo. Get them while they’re hot – the channelized T3 interface will house 28 customer T1 circuits, so if you want one, order early. If you’re interested in ordering, email sales@sonic.net and let us know. -Dane and Scott

Sun Aug 27 21:16:46 PDT 2000 — Problems with Guerneville and Occidental -9811 numbers. We’ve had a few lines in West Sonoma County come up with a recording ‘the service isn’t available on this line’ instead of carrier. We suspect a call routing problem to our Focal PRI’s here in Santa Rosa — either that, or the calls aren’t rolling from the -9811 numbers onto our two new Focal PRI’s.

In any event, the problem has cleared now, and we have submitted a request for ‘reason for failure’ from Focal. We’ll also be double-checking that all our Focal PRI’s are available to service -9811 calls. Finally, please note that this did not effect any number that _doesn’t_ end with -9811. -Scott