Thu Nov 11 16:17:42 PST 1999 — We’re still struggling with troubles on the primary T3 circuit here, and the next step in the troubleshooting is to change up a buffer count in the circuit provisioning setup. This will entail about three minutes of downtime for this circuit, and during this time, our two backup T1 circuits will be running very full, and probably quite slow. The alternative is to do this late at night, but the performance on the T3 is so poor right now that we’d like to make every effort to get this resolve ASAP. -Dane

Wed Nov 10 20:33:57 PST 1999 — The packet loss issue has been cleared, we determined that our SMDS/DSU needed additional configuration, and we’ve had some issues communicating with the device to configure it. We need support from the hardware Vendor to resolve these issues. In the short term, we’ve backed our access-class down to it’s previous level, and will turn it back up tomorrow morning. -Eli

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