Thu Jul 6 23:32:40 PDT 2000 — After much bad luck with system corruption and attempted upgrades gone wrong, we’re in the process of a new installation onto a fresh hard disk for our Usenet news server. Once that’s complete, the /opt filesystem with the Typhoon news software, databases and spools will be mounted to bring news back online.

Meanwhile, we’ve of course got our redundant backup news system at supernews.sonic.net that you can use. It doesn’t have the sonic.* local groups, but you’ll find it to be quite complete and responsive.

Scott, Eli and Kelsey are pulling the night watch to bring this system back online, and I’ll be covering the early AM shift while they get some much needed rest Friday. -Dane

Thu Jul 6 19:35:13 PDT 2000 — After many Solaris nightmares, we can confirm that we most definitely love Linux much more than Solaris x86. We’re escalating with Sun’s engineering group to get additional assistance, and we hope to wrap this up as soon as possible. Basicly, the BIOS upgrade caused the PCI bus to enumerate the devices differently, and this confused the operating system.

Thu Jul 6 13:43:42 PDT 2000 — The News Server BIOS upgrade didn’t go as planned – the new BIOS appears to have changed the IO port and/or IRQ for the SCSI controller, which Solaris doesn’t like. We are currently scrambling to get it back online ASAP. -Kelsey, Eli, and Scott

Wed Jul 5 09:10:30 PDT 2000 — Our 1003 dialup group was returning all circuits are busy messages this morning. We discovered a PRI that needed rebooted. After the reboot everything is fine. Some people may have been disconnected when this happened. -Steve

Wed Jul 5 16:12:50 PDT 2000 — The News Server is going offline for more work on its RAID array. We’ve encountered an incompatibility with the existing SCSI controller and are going to swap it out for a replacement. Downtime shouldn’t exceed 20 minutes. We are sorry for the inconvenience the news server maintenance is causing but we are working on it in the fast track to resolve it’s performance issues. -Kelsey and Eli

Wed Jul 5 14:31:24 PDT 2000 — The News Server is offline for the integration of its new RAID array. Total downtime should not exceed 20 minutes. – Eli and Kelsey

Tue Jul 4 13:59:55 PDT 2000 — Broadlink had a backhaul failure of a wireless connection between downtown Santa Rosa and a tower site serving South-Eastern Santa Rosa, and some customers were offline for about 45 minutes this morning.

Sun Jul 2 02:00:50 PDT 2000 — Bolt’s RAID array has been removed, but we’re having some trouble getting it working on the news server. This resulted in longer downtime for that system than we had planned. Our core Cisco 7507 router has been upgraded with more system RAM. -Dane and Kelsey

Fri Jun 30 09:24:09 PDT 2000 — We are going to be doing some maintenance and upgrades starting 00:30 hours Sunday morning. First, we will be taking bolt offline to remove it’s RAID. Once bolt is back online we will take news services offline in order to install the RAID in typhoon. Once news services are back online we will be taking our core Cisco router, mega, offline for a memory upgrade. We anticipate that mega will only be offline for 10 minutes at most while we install the additional RAM. Please keep in mind that while mega is offline, you will not be able to access anything outside of Sonic’s network. -Kelsey and Scott

Wed Jun 28 01:07:25 PDT 2000 — Our T1 circuit to dialup customers in San Rafael went down at 12:55am — rebooting the CSU/DSU at 1:05am fixed the problem, and the circuit is back up. Downtime was 10 minutes. -Scott