Mon Oct 11 12:04:20 PDT 1999 — We’ve added two new anti-SPAM defenses to the primary mail server for Sonic.net. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of junk email that we’re all seeing in our mailboxes. These two new systems, the RSS (Relay Spam Stopper) and DUL (DialUp List) are intended to augment the RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) that we’ve been using for years. The RSS blocks systems which have been abused as third party relays. It’s similar to the RBL in this way. The DUL blocks direct email delivery by ISP dialups, as delivery should instead be coming from mail servers. This should help with the increasing volume of SPAM which is coming from direct delivery engines which run on dialup PCs. Currently only the RBL is in place for locally hosted domains other than Sonic.net – we’ll be working on getting the others implemented shortly. For discussions about anti-SPAM measures, please read and post to news://news.sonic.net/sonic.spam-can.d -Dane

Fri Oct 8 21:52:40 PDT 1999 — Earlier this evening, we had an issue with our news server. The active file was out of sync with articles in newsgroups. We renumbered the active file, with the result that some news clients will show new articles in groups, but opening the groups will show no new articles. We apologize for the inconvenience. -Scott

Thu Oct 7 14:35:07 PDT 1999 — Sonic.sonic.net ran out of memory at about 12:15 this afternoon, and had to be rebooted. The secondary DNS and Authentication servers took over, but some customers may have noticed delays or difficulty in resoving names/getting authenticated between 12:15-12:30. We apologize for the downtime! — Eli

Mon Oct 04 14:15:50 PST 1999 — We are currently tracking an issue with the Focal 9811 dialup pool. During peak access times, you may notice a strange modem sound, connects at 1200 bps or have no connectivity. We expect to have a solution shortly. -Dave J

Wed Sep 29 14:44:51 PDT 1999 — East/West Internet traffic has been a bit congested today due to a fiber cut which damaged four huge cross country links. About 33 gigabits (768 T3s) worth of fiber connections were severed. We’re seeing some odd re-routing of traffic to the East coast via Europe, and some performance impact. For more info, ZDNet has a story at:

www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2343896,00.html

Tue Sep 28 10:15:35 PDT 1999 — The DSL circuit is back up. We have a PacBell tester en route to do a ‘post-mortem’ on the Alcatel Fiber Mux, in an effort to learn more about the outage. See the sonic.dsl newsgroup for updates! – Eli and Dane

Tue Sep 28 09:19:45 PDT 1999 — The ATM backhaul that links our PacBell DSL router to Pacific Bell is not passing any traffic, which is affecting all Sonic DSL customers. We are working with Bell to get the circuit up ASAP, updates here in the MOTD – Eli

Fri Sep 24 18:22:36 PDT 1999 — One of our mail hosts ran low on disk space, resulting in it’s inability to accept mail. The mail host handles most mail destined for outside our network. We’ve cleared the condition, and now all mail destined for outside our network is getting delivered. Some mail may have been delayed; we apologize for the delay, and stress that no mail was lost. -Scott and Steve

Tue Sep 21 14:34:54 PDT 1999 — The CPU fan on one of Thunder’s processors failed. We elected to replace it immediately upon discovery. Downtime for Thunder, our multihome web server, was approximately three minutes. -Eli, Scott, and Dave

Tue Sep 21 00:17:41 PDT 1999 — prop.sonic.net aka mail.sonic.net is having some problems this evening which may cause some users to see errors when trying to send email. We’re looking at the trouble, so if you bump into this, please try to send again in a few minutes. -Dane