Wed Nov 10 16:56:09 PST 1999 — The new bandwidth is online, but now we’re seeing some packet loss and higher latency on this circuit. This is causing performance to be a bit sluggish. Both PacBell and UUNet have tickets open, and are working quickly to isolate and eliminate this trouble. We’ll keep you posted here. -Dane

Wed Nov 10 15:26:14 PST 1999 — We’re working to bring up additional T3 network capacity here, and as we tune the circuits, performance may be a little inconsistant to some sites. We should see better speed and performance in a few minutes! -Dane

Wed Nov 3 09:56:36 PST 1999 — pm10.sonic.net, one of the access servers in the 1001 dial group had troubles this AM, and needed to be rebooted. It was in a very odd state; it didn’t go off the network, so we didn’t have an indication that it had failed, but it was marking idle ports which had users connected, and wasn’t passing data to the serial ports. -Dane

Mon Nov 1 12:23:24 PST 1999 — Since 11:00hrs, we’ve been seeing some of our Covad DSL customers go down intermittently. Covad states that they have some major issues at the San Francisco, Chicago, and D.C. network facilities, and this is affecting our customers. No ETA from Covad yet, but they are putting all their resources into the problem – Eli

Mon Nov 1 19:03:25 PST 1999 — Covad has announced that their issues are resolved. It seems that a portion of their ATM network (in Dallas!) went down this morning, and the subsequent re-routing of traffic caused issues throughout their network. Our customers were mostly all back up again by 14:00hrs, but with no official ‘release’ from Covad I waited before updating the MOTD. – Eli

Fri Oct 29 12:19:10 PDT 1999 — We’re renumbering the active file on Ultra, aka news.sonic.net, and this means that posts you make right now will be delayed, and will show up in a little while. Additionally, the article counts which you see before you enter the group may be way off from the number of articles that are in the group.

In other news news, our new satellite linked news feed and server are coming together. The satellite dish is being installed on Monday. This new machine has more than 100 gigs of spool space, half a gig of ram, and will be able to do a really good job with all of the Usenet, including binaries. -Dane

Wed Oct 27 12:14:18 PDT 1999 — Focal just turned up more capacity on the ###-9811 lines. This should alleviate busy signals on the 9811 dialup pool. To find a local focal number you can use our pop finder tool at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl -Steve

Mon Oct 25 12:35:56 PDT 1999 — We will be moving our Covad DSL circuit to a new switch tonight. This will happen at around midnight and will cause a short period of downtown for Covad DSL customers. Also at this time we will be adding more memory to bolt.sonic.net so shell access will not be available for 10 to 20 minutes while we do this upgrade. -Steve

Sun Oct 24 15:36:07 PDT 1999 — Slow Usenet and mail server performance. Ultra has been having trouble accepting new posts intermittantly since Thursday. I’ve just restarted innd, and it’s performing well now. We’ve got a new news server on it’s way, so we’ll limp along for another week or few on Ultra as we deploy the new box. The new server, our fourth news server incarnation since Sonic.net’s inception has half a gigabyte of RAM and over 100 gigs of Usenet news spool space. It’s a huge, fire breathing, satellite linked super-fast powerhouse. Notably, it’s also our first non-Linux server, and our first non-INN based Usenet news server. The new system runs the Typhoon Usenet server under Solaris 7. Over 50,000 newsgroups will be available, and binaries will be quite complete. The new satellite downlink allows for two full T1s (3Mbps) worth of inbound bandwidth while freeing space on our terrestrial circuits for customer traffic. We are also expecting an upgrade from 3Mbps to 10Mbps in the next few months to handle expanding Usenet volume.

As a result of Ultra’s trouble receiving new posts, Buzz, our inbound mail server has had a backlog of inbound mail delivery. qmail on Buzz will deliver 10 local messages concurrently, and what was happening was that the news posting backlogs for spam@sonic.net were using up all 10 queue slots for many minutes as a time. We’ve deferred the spam mail to a local mailbox on Buzz for a time, and the queue backlog is clearing. Sorry for the inbound email delay this afternoon! -Dane

Wed Oct 20 23:18:04 PDT 1999 — Tonight a bit past midnight we’ll be replacing the makeshift fuse assembly in the the RedBack DSL router with the new fuse they delivered today. Downtime will be under five minutes. -Dane