Tue Apr 4 12:36:26 PDT 2000 — In two unrelated chains of events, we had two issues in the last 20 minutes. The ATM DS-3 that serves our PacBell DSL customers lost carrier for a period of about ten minutes, and near that time our Shell server ran into resource problems and had to be rebooted. Sorry for the rocky morning! — Eli, Dom, Kelsey and Scott

Tue Apr 4 11:22:56 PDT 2000 — news.sonic.net will be going offline this afternoon to add 150GB of additional spool and to be reinstalled into the proper rack mount case. We are more than doubling the existing spool since we did not anticipate receiving nearly 90GB a day of news feeds. We usually do this kind of work at night when they will effect the least number of people. Oddly enough, mid-afternoon is when the news server gets the lightest load– it must be the alt.binaries tree 😉 -Kelsey and Eli

Tue Apr 4 14:26:10 PDT 2000 — One of the mail servers in our group of four ran into issues this afternoon. The symptom was mail being bounced with a ‘user unknown’ message. It’s important to note that no mail was lost or misdelivered during this period, and the return message would lead remote users to attempt redelivery. We have three systems in place to prevent this issue, including our Alteon load-balancing switch, and we are working with Alteon now to obtain a warranty replacement for our unit. In addition, we have been working all morning to bring up new hosts to replace the servers in place, and the failed machine, ‘buzz.sonic.net’ was slated for an OS upgrade this very afternoon. The timing was unfortunate, as the work in progress will eliminate this issue for good. — Eli, Scott, Kelsey

Tue Mar 28 16:25:38 PST 2000 — We got two major upgrades done today. First, we slid a brand new SQL server under our old SQL server. The new box has a whole lot more power than the old one, and you may notice the member tools speed up as a result. We sure noticed the difference with our internal support and accounting tools. Second, buzz, was rebuilt and setup with sendmail and put into the mail load balancing server group again. This gives us four snappy mail servers in the group and plenty of speed, redundancy (two servers can almost sustain the load,) and room to grow. -Kelsey and Eli

Sat Mar 25 17:18:51 PST 2000 — After extensive testing, our new dynamic apache configuration is online. The system was tested by running it on port 81 for all multihomes — feedback was gathered in news:sonic.help.www. We also tested SSI and Frontpage after the switch, found some problems, and corrected them. The new configuration improves the stability and speed of apache, and allows us to continue with our load-balancing project. The load-balancing project uses our Altheon web director to direct traffic to multiple web servers — traffic is directed to the most responsive server, and should a web server go down, traffic is automatically directed to servers that are up. If you detect a problem with your multihome, please email support@sonic.net or post a note in news:sonic.help.www. Thanks. -Scott, Eli, and Kelsey

Wed Mar 22 12:54:58 PST 2000 — As a side effect of reloading the router this morning, some of our remote dial-up POP’s saw spotty connectivity to pop.sonic.net and mail.sonic.net. This caused intermittent delays in mail retrieval for customers using these POP’s. We’ve resolved the issue, and apologize once more for the rocky start to the day! — Eli, Kelsey

Wed Mar 22 10:19:25 PST 2000 — We’ve noticed some packet loss at our gateway to UUNet, and this correleates with some unusual behavior we’ve noticed in our core router. Despite the 5 minute downtime, we elected to reboot the router. We will continue to monitor the situation, and apologize for the ‘bump’. – Eli, Kelsey, and Dave

Wed Mar 22 17:08:56 PST 2000 — More action in our web server configurations. Some changes are coming down the pipe for multihomes, including different ErrorDocument handling. Please visit news:sonic.help.www (thread: ‘New server configuration’) for details. -Scott

Tue Mar 21 11:52:58 PST 2000 — Due to repeated request from our customers to keep their mail boxes free from SPAM we have implemented four new anti-spam filters in our mail servers: RBL, RSS, DUL and mail-abuse.org’s Relay list. In the first hour since these rules have been in place we’ve already caught over 1000 pieces of SPAM! We’d like to hear some feedback to know if you find these new rules effective in stopping SPAM. -Kelsey and Eli

Mon Mar 20 18:54:40 PST 2000 — Some web sites reported problems with CGI today, which appears to be related to the number of virtual hosts on Thunder. As an interim fix, we’ve moved 250 virtual hosts to Storm. Additionally, we are experimenting with a new web server configuration that uses dynamic virtual host configuration. If you have a multihome, please test the new configuration by visiting yourdomain.com:81 — please report your findings to news:sonic.help.www. Thanks. -Scott and Kelsey