Thu Feb 10 14:42:44 PST 2000 — We have noticed numerous problems with ISDN in Santa Rosa including our own 547-2000 lines and have spoken with Pac Bell. Apparently there was a faulty DCE handler in the Pac Bell switch. Most of our equipment is back online and we expect everything else to be up shortly. This problem manifested with ISDN equipment unable to get D- Channel bonding. – Eli

Wed Feb 9 17:57:12 PST 2000 — All inbound and outbound email is now load balanced with the Alteon AD3 switch. There are four real mail servers, ultra, prop, buzz and sub, which all service SMTP and POP3. The AD3 receives requests for the virtual servers mail.sonic.net and pop.sonic.net and transparently hands those connections to the healthiest real mail server. This means that a single server may go down without any of our customers noticing an interruption in service. We are continuing to work to bring the same kind of redundancy to our web hosting services. The Alteon truly is an awesome addition to our network and enables us to provide faster and more reliable services to our customers. – Kelsey and Eli

Mon Jan 17 11:22:08 PST 2000 — One of our mail servers, ultra.sonic.net had problems this AM, but it was backed up by two other systems, so there was no interruption or delay in email services. -Dane and Kelsey

Thu Jan 13 15:22:51 PST 2000 — We upgraded our skycache satellite downlink from 3Mbit/s to 10Mbit/s today. Our news server and akamai servers are fed through this feed and should perform better as a result. — Kelsey and Eli.

Thu Jan 13 15:01:45 PST 2000 — We had to reboot our core router mega this afternoon. This accounted for about 5 minutes of downtime. We encountered a bug in the IOS software while trying to shape our network traffic load. Eli and Scott are currently working with Cisco to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. — Eli, Scott, and Kelsey.

Sun Jan 9 23:24:11 PST 2000 — Some serious issues at our UUNet upstream router has caused some intermittent connectivity problems – UUNet engineers and Sonic’s staff are working to resolve this, it appears that the core UUNet router at San Jose experienced a failure, and has been repaired. — Eli, Steve.

Fri Jan 7 11:51:51 PST 2000 — On Friday the 14th of Jan we will be removing all traces of statbot from our web servers. If you wish to keep the old stats you should copy the /stats directories from your multihomed website into another directory. Once the stats directory is removed there will be no way of recovering the old information. For those of you who don’t already know, the statbot package was replaced by urchin, which you may access at www.sonic.net/stats -Kelsey

Thu Jan 6 17:43:43 PST 2000 — Ultra, one of our mail servers, had a problem authenticating users. This caused some mail to bounce. We caught the the problem quickly and re-started the server. This caused very little impact. -Steve

Mon Jan 3 19:45:07 PST 2000 — It’s the first weekday after Y2K, and we’ve seen a number of minor cosmetic issues here and elsewhere on the Internet. Typical ones include dates displayed as year ‘100, or as 19100.

Here at Sonic.net, we’ve replaced the shell news reader ‘tin’ with a new version to address a problem where it was offering all groups as new upon startup, which meant you had to say ‘N’ to all groups to get into the program. The new version is 1.4.1, and is a release version that adds some nice new features as well. If you’re interested in continuing to run the old version, you can run ‘tin.old -q’ to get quiet mode so that it won’t offer you new groups. This will mean that you would get notification of legitimate new groups however, so we recommend just running the new version as ‘tin’.

Elm was listing some dates incorrectly, and we’ve updated to a newer version. The new version supports metamail better, and has a number of other new features. However, it does not include closely tied PGP integration, so you’ll need to filter any PGP mail to the command ‘pgp -fm’ if you use PGP. We actually recommend moving away from elm toward mutt, as it’s under much more active development, is faster, and supports larger mailboxes much better.

Our ‘Count.cgi’ counter program was displaying the year as ‘100’ instead of ’00’ for web pages where customers were using the counter to display the current date. We’ve patched the Count.cgi program to resolve this.

Our email invoicing program thought that the year was 2001 instead of 2000 and sent invoices to about 2% of our customers for 12 months longer than their usual billing period. This only affected customers billed by email, not credit card, so no charges were actually made. The software has been fixed, and new invoices have been sent to the affected users already, along with an email note of explanation.

Please keep us posted if you see any other odd behavior that you suspect may be related to the date change. Posting to news:sonic.help would be great. -Dane, Eli and Kelsey

Sat Jan 1 00:08:19 PST 2000 — Happy New Year everyone! Note the date/time stamp on this entry, ^^^^ =) -Dane & Dave