Thu Mar 9 16:51:50 PST 2000 — We’ve installed a new satilite receiver and a new satilite adapter from Cidera, the company formerly know as Skycache. We hope that this will help improve our newsfeed’s overall performance and reduce the number of missing articles. While the equipment was being swapped we were not receiving a full news feed and consequently we will be missing some articles. We are also going to be receiving full news feeds from uu.net and cw.net in the near future. -Kelsey and Dane.

Wed Mar 8 11:17:11 PST 2000 — We had to reboot shell.sonic.net to resolve some issues with sshd on short notice. It was only down for a just a few minutes. – Dane, Steve, Eli, and Kelsey

Wed Mar 8 17:50:49 PST 2000 — ultra.sonic.net, one of the load balanced SMTP mail servers, stopped accepting new mail briefly. The issue has been resolved and the server load ballancer’s configuration has been updated to prevent this failure state from occurring again. – Kelsey and Steve

Tue Mar 7 17:52:12 PST 2000 — We are planning a massive power plant upgrade for our data center that will be implemented this Sunday morning between 2am and 3am. Many services will remain online including core routing, dialup access, DNS, shell and multihomed web hosting. Mail, FTP and Usenet will be offline. Expected power downtime is actually just about two minutes, but we expect the actual service downtime for these services to be around 20 minutes as we coordinate shutdown and restart of servers. The two minute outage is scheduled to begin at 2:15AM PST, Sunday March 12th.

This upgrade brings us to a redundant dual UPS configuration which eliminates the current potential for a point of failure in a single UPS. It also gives us the ability to add additional battery runtime, and it deals with some concerns about weight as the battery plant grows. -Dane, Scott, Eli and the rest of the ops (we’ll all be here!)

Tue Mar 7 17:21:51 PST 2000 — Our satellite newsfeed will be down for upgrades between 7pm PST and 8pm PST tonight. This means that we won’t get as much new Usenet news traffic during this hour, but it’ll come in after the downlink is back online. -Dane

Mon Mar 6 12:57:56 PST 2000 — Pacific Bell is reporting a widespread DSL outage in the Bay Area that is affecting some Sonic.net DSL customers. They currently report no estimated time to repair, but they are working hard on this issue now. If your DSL modem’s ‘sync’ light is blinking red, and your DSL is not functioning right now, this is PacBell trouble is likely the issue. If you have further questions, you could phone Pacific Bell repair, but we’ve experienced very long hold times in attempting to reach them. -Dane and Dom

Fri Mar 3 11:05:28 PST 2000 — Sonic.net is offering free basic Internet access for a full year, or a $198 rebate to customers who switch to high speed DSL. This brings the cost of DSL to within about $5 per month of dialup for customer who currently have a dedicated modem phone line that they could disconnect after moving to DSL, so we’re pretty excited about it. DSL is up to 50x as fast as modem access, so it’s an amazing value. For all the details, see my post to news:sonic.dsl, or check the information and sign-up form at:

www.sonic.net/sales/dsl/pacbell/

Sun Feb 27 02:36:35 PST 2000 — After some more issues, we’re now running the current general deployment of IOS on our core Cisco router. It’s still got one annoying issue which Cisco is working on for us now. We’ll need to do another upgrade when they have that resolution.

The news server power supply has been swapped. -Dane and Scott

Fri Feb 25 01:43:46 PST 2000 — The new OS version for our Cisco core router did not perform well, and we had to go back to the older release. The 100Mbps Ethernet interface was massively impacted under the new release, and the system was basicly unreachable. We spoke with Cisco, and have sent them a tech dump for analysis. Right now, a nice Cisco engineer named Dave in the England is analyzing the information and doing tests to duplicate and eliminate the problem. He says he should have some results by the end of his workday, 5PM GMT, 9AM PST, so if things go well there we should have information before we return to the office for our own workday. We’ll make any required changes and will try again this Saturday night after midnight.

We’ve put off the power supply swap in the news server until Saturday because we took longer than expected testing OS releases on the Cisco. -Dane and Scott

Thu Feb 24 17:41:57 PST 2000 — We will be upgrading our core Cisco router to a new version of it’s operating system tonight between midnight and 1am. We expect downtime of about three minutes while it reloads, and during this time, Internet access will not be available. The new OS version allows us to do additional load balancing to enhance performance, and also resolves a few bugs.

We will also be replacing the power supply in news.sonic.net tonight. We expect this system will be offline for about 15 minutes while we put in the new power supply and reboot. -Dane and Scott