Wed May 5 14:59:44 PDT 1999 — We ran stats on our dial groups this morning and found quite a few modems with problems. We’ve cleared these issues, and we expect less customers will have problems with ringing and no answer, or dialing and reaching silence. -Dane and Scott

Tue May 4 20:54:52 PDT 1999 — Because of the smurf attack, we’re still blocking ICMP echo replies to bolt.sonic.net. This means that ping and mtr will not function, but traceroute will. We’re taking steps to come up with a smurf protection which will allow these two diagnostic tools to continue to function.

For the people who are abusing IRC, let this serve as notice. We have reached the limits of our tolerance, and we will be cancelling accounts of customers who misbehave in IRC. Channel wars, bots and other attacks will not be tolerated, and your account will be deleted if you misbehave. It’s time to grow up. Your abuse is impacting other customers. For everone else, if you observe improper behavior on the shell server, please email support@sonic.net and let us know. -Dane and Scott

Mon May 3 17:36:00 PDT 1999 — We’re testing a new config at our Sebastopol POP, and if you’re using that dialup, we’d appreciate you testing it. Note that any toll calls are your responsiblity, so only dial this number if you know it’s local for you! The test number is 707-824-9930. This number is not part of a hunt group, so you should report your results to pm3test@sonic.net and then move back to the regular number to avoid busy signals. -Dane and Steve

Sun May 2 23:33:59 PDT 1999 — Our three network connections were all flooded with packets in a smurf attack this evening. We filtered the traffic on the T3 and shut down the other two circuits, and have just filtered the Sprint T1 and it’s back online now. We are working right now to get filters on the Cable and Wireless T1 so that we can bring that circuit back online as well.

This smurf attack is apparently in retaliation for our customers actions in IRC. I would like to reiterate that bots or any form of bad behavior in IRC will be cause for deletion of your Sonic.net account. Denial of service attacks affect other Sonic.net customers, and we don’t like dealing with these type of issues. -Dane

Sat May 1 21:26:27 PDT 1999 — Sunday morning maintenance. We will be performing maintenance on the following systems from 2:30AM until as late as 5AM:

News: filesystem checks. The news server will be unavailable for up to 30 minutes for a root filesystem check. It will then become available, but will be throttled for up to two hours for a check of the news spool’s filesystem. While reading and posting news will work as usual, posts will not appear in newsgroups until the server is unthrottled.

Web: Thunder, our web server for multihomes, will gain a new logging subsystem.

Net: Changes to the security filters in our border router may cause momentary loss of Internet connectivity. -Scott

Fri Apr 30 11:27:00 PDT 1999 — Some folks have noticed problems with cgi’s on multihomed web sites. This appears to be a resource issue (specifically, file descriptors). We are currently optimizing Apache on Thunder to use less of those resources, which should be completed before 2pm. -Scott

Fri Apr 30 10:36:10 PDT 1999 — Apparently, the recent news server OS upgrade has had a strange side effect: every morning around 4:30am, the server exits. We will wrap the server with a ‘service loop’ to prevent this from happening in the future, and then investigate the cause of the mysterious program exits. We regret this morning’s news incident, and will redouble our efforts to stabilize the system while maintaining its newfound speediness.

In other news: The new mail server, Buzz, experienced some pain this morning with its NFS mount to member home directories. The result: delivery of some mail this morning was delayed as long as 5 hours. We regret the delay, and hope no one was impacted. -Scott

Fri Apr 30 01:41:26 PDT 1999 — Today is the last day to take advantage of our $9.95 domain registration special, so act now if you’d like to get your own domain for your business or personal use. To register, use the tools at www.sonic.net/tools/. Pricing will go to $24.95 starting the first of May. -Dane

Thu Apr 29 12:41:50 PDT 1999 — We’ve had a quite few server issues that have affected customers in the past 24 hours. Here’s an overview:

Storm.sonic.net, aka www.sonic.net crashed with a kernel panic last night around 9pm last night. Dustin was on the premises and rebooted it, and it was down for a total of about 30 minutes.

At 4am last night the FTP server got backlogged with lots of people in Japan downloading MP3 files from user ftp space, and the ftp server was failing to answer due to the large load. We’ve removed or changed permissions on the pirated music, and have sent warnings to the customers who were publishing this copywritten material. Please don’t do that, we prefer to sleep at night.

At 4:30am news.sonic.net’s INN server exited, and Scott and I restarted it within 10 minutes – if you were reading news at that hour, you would have noticed, but most of you were sleeping.

At around 6am, a dialup user at another ISP tried to brute force guess the email password of one of our customers, and the resulting logged failures filled up our mail server’s disk drive to a point where new mail couldn’t be received. We have modified our disk use monitoring script so that the tool will page us before we reach the user full threshold – we actually had space, but only in the root reserved percentage, so new mail was backlogged. This modification to the paging system will prevent this problem in the future.

The mail server disk space issue has caused inbound email to be backlogged – we’re receiving a large volume of email now which was sent between 6am and 10am this morning. Sorry for the delay in receipt of these emails!

Lots of little issues – we’re on the job, and keeping things running here. -Dane, Scott, Steve and Eli

Wed Apr 28 12:11:38 PDT 1999 — Sonic.net is now offering free outgoing FAX service to Santa Rosa and surrounding areas including Sebastopol, Rohnert Park, Windsor, Forestville and parts of Petaluma. If you’d like to send a FAX, visit our FAX page at www.sonic.net/fax/ for information.

You can FAX via email, or use client software to integrate with a scanner or other software. Use this gateway to FAX to businesses and individuals throughout the coverage area without being forced to go offline to free up a phone line for your FAX machine or FAX modem. Add email to FAX addresses to your address book so that you can send to groups of people, some of whom have email, and some who have only FAX, and all of them can receive the same group message by sending just one email.

Additionally, if you’d like to have a special direct-to-FAX email address, eg faxusername@sonic.net which forwards directly to your FAX machine, email support@sonic.net with your FAX number and the address you’d like and we’ll set it up. You could use this easy to remember address if you’d like instant delivery of orders or other correspondence without being online. If you elect to do this, be sure to avoid getting this address on any spam lists! =)

There is also a service for free inbound FAXing, so if you’d like to completely toss your FAX machine out, check out www.efax.com/. Kudos to Steve Johnson for setting up Sonic.net’s new FAX gateway. -Dane

www.sonic.net/fax/