Tue Apr 13 11:39:24 PDT 1999 — (Updated) I’m pleased to report that both PacWest and Focal dialup circuits are online and functioning well.

Yesterday morning, PacBell and PacWest made changes to the trunking serving Cloverdale, and we are seeing high speed connections on those lines. Some customers were getting connections as low as 2400bps and 4800bps on Monday and Tuesday of this week. This slow speed situation has been resolved.

In addition, we’ve been working fast and hard to get the new Focal circuits online, and we paid $1000.00 to move the due date from April 25th up to the 9th. PacBell and Focal worked together quickly to get this new capacity online, and I’m pleased to announce that it’s available now!

New capacity with Focal means that we’re free of two major ongoing problems.

The first is phone company quality. PacWest at times has returned ‘all circuits busy’ messages to our customers, and early this week, ridiculously poor connection speeds. With the new Focal circuits, all customers in all service areas can choose between at least two telephone companies in case of these type of troubles.

The second is modem incompatibility. Some customers have reported problems with slow speeds, retrains or disconnects since the deployment of Livingston PM3 equipment with PacWest on the xxx-0174 numbers. Now, with the Focal deployment, we’ve provisioned these lines with USRobotics Total Control Enterprise Hub equipment, just like Santa Rosa’s xxx-1003 dial group. What this means is that all customers in all service areas can choose the modem equipment which works best with their modem.

This new deployment also gets us a couple new features. The USR gear supports X2 as well as v.90, and the Livingston gear supports K56Flex as well as v.90. Additionally, the Focal lines support true 64kbps ISDN, so users who’ve been forced down to 56kbps ISDN on PacWest can move over to Focal for better speed.

Sonic.net is committed to customer satisfaction, and we’ve made a significant investment in equipment and lines to give customers maximum flexibility. The payoff is that every customer in every service area can choose between at least two phone companies, and between the two major modem/access server vendors.

For your reference, PacWest numbers are xxx-0174, and Focal numbers are xxx-9811.

All 150+ of Sonic.net’s local dialup numbers for 80 cities in Northern California are integrated into our POP finder tool at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl — As always, Sonic.net is not responsible for long distance telephone charges. Check with your operator to make sure that any number you use is local!

Thu Apr 8 14:29:50 PDT 1999 — I’m pleased to report that both PacWest and Focal dialup circuits are online and functioning well.

Yesterday morning, PacBell and PacWest made changes to the trunking serving Cloverdale, and we are seeing high speed connections on those lines. Some customers were getting connections as low as 2400bps and 4800bps on Monday and Tuesday of this week. This slow speed situation has been resolved.

In addition, we’ve been working fast and hard to get the new Focal circuits online, and we paid $1000.00 to move the due date from April 25th up to the 9th. PacBell and Focal worked together quickly to get this new capacity online, and I’m pleased to announce that it’s available now!

New capacity with Focal means that we’re free of two major ongoing problems.

The first is phone company quality. PacWest at times has returned ‘all circuits busy’ messages to our customers, and early this week, ridiculously poor connection speeds. With the new Focal circuits, all customers in all service areas can choose between at least two telephone companies in case of these type of troubles.

The second is modem incompatibility. Some customers have reported problems with slow speeds, retrains or disconnects since the deployment of Livingston PM3 equipment with PacWest on the xxx-0174 numbers. Now, with the Focal deployment, we’ve provisioned these lines with USRobotics Total Control Enterprise Hub equipment, just like Santa Rosa’s xxx-1003 dial group. What this means is that all customers in all service areas can choose the modem equipment which works best with their modem.

This new deployment also gets us a couple new features. The USR gear supports X2 as well as v.90, and the Livingston gear supports K56Flex as well as v.90. Additionally, the Focal lines support true 64kbps ISDN, so users who’ve been forced down to 56kbps ISDN on PacWest can move over to Focal for better speed.

Sonic.net is committed to customer satisfaction, and we’ve made a significant investment in equipment and lines to give customers maximum flexibility. The payoff is that every customer in every service area can choose between at least two phone companies, and between the two major modem/access server vendors.

For your reference, PacWest numbers are xxx-0174, and Focal numbers are xxx-9811. We’re currently working on integrating the 70 new Focal served cities into our POP finder tool. In the mean time, you can use Focal’s tool at www.sonic.net/info/focal/ to find Focal only numbers. Customers who are having problems with xxx-0174 numbers can get new Focal numbers at this address.

Shortly, all 150+ of Sonic.net’s local dialup numbers for 80 cities in Northern California will be integrated into our POP finder tool at www.sonic.net/cgi-bin/pops.pl — As always, Sonic.net is not responsible for long distance telephone charges. Check with your operator to make sure that any number you use is local!

Tue Apr 6 16:02:06 PDT 1999 — We’re continuing to experience problems in the Cloverdale area and some other North locations. We’ve observed customers connecting at ridiculously low rates of speed – 4800bps, 9600bps and even 2400bps, mostly out of Cloverdale. We’ve asked PacWest, the phone company serving the xxx-0174 numbers to resolve this trouble, and they’re opening a ticket with PacBell, but I don’t see a whole lot of progress happening.

We’re working hard to get the new lines and equipment with Focal online as quickly as possible. Previously, they had told us we would get final delivery on April 25th, and I’ve asked them to expedite. They today offered us a fee based after hours expedite for $1000, and we’ve given them this money to get it moving faster. It looks like we’ll be able to hit this Friday, the 9th. PacBell’s outside special services fellow has been really good about making this happen fast, but he says that realisticly, we’ll be lucky if we get it up by the end of the day tommorow. There’s a lot of people and groups to make move on this.

Internally, we’ve received today the new hardware – almost $30,000 worth of new USR gear for these Focal circuits. Steve is working right now to get them configured and ready for the circuits. Ian just ran the cross connect cables, so we’re going to be ready as soon as PacBell and Focal can deliver. Kudos to everyone who’s working hard and fast to get these new circuits online, and best of luck to PacWest in finding and resolving the issues with their trunks.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a situation where our customers can assist in getting PacBell and PacWest to resolve the slowdown situation. If you are located North of here and in the last couple days have started getting connections at rates of speed slower than 14,400 on the xxx-0174 numbers, I would like to ask you to call PacBell and open a trouble ticket.

Please let them know what number you are calling, and that it used to connect at a much higher rate of speed. They will issue you a ticket number, and likely tell you that it’s all your ISPs fault (it’s not). Please ask them to look into it regardless. I think that having PacBell customers to open trouble tickets will get us a faster resolution on this issue. Please follow up to news:sonic.help and let us know if you opened a ticket, and what resolution you got. -Dane

Mon Apr 5 12:23:00 PDT 1999 — A number of users with FTP directories had large amounts of pirated software in their FTP space. This caused a lot of download traffic and network congestion this AM. This, paired with leftover reports regarding the SMURF troubles last night led to longer than usual hold times in technical support between 9am and 11am. We brought on extra staff to handle the call load and cleared up the FTP server impact and all’s well. -Dane, Scott and Eli

Mon Apr 5 17:07:07 PDT 1999 — After many users reported good luck with the test line in Sebastopol, we did an upgrade of the equipment which serves the xxx-0174 numbers with this new software. This resulted in a flood of reports of trouble – it looks like the new software clears problems for many users, but causes many new troubles as well. We’ve gone back to the ‘stable’ firmware and it’s ongoing problems. We’ll keep seeking solutions here. Please see the MOTD entry on April 2nd for more information on the testing that we’re doing – we could use your input.

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting on Focal Communications for new lines to serve all areas currently served by xxx-0174 numbers. Once these lines are up, in any location you’ll be able to pick from two or more telephone companies and both USR and Livingston equipment. As a side benefit, X2 will be available in all locations, as well as K56Flex and v.90. Focal is currently projecting installation on the 25th of this month, and we’re pressing them to accelerate this installation. -Dane and Steve

Mon Apr 5 13:09:35 PDT 1999 — Much of the piracy load on the FTP server this AM was caused by anonymous users creating directories, then uploading software into them. This circumvented the mode 0733 protection that many users put on incoming directories. When the FTP server was upgraded from wuftpd to the new proftpd, the configuration which denied anonymous users the ability to create subdirectories wasn’t migrated. We’ve added this config option, and are cleaning up the leftover subdirectories. -Dane

Sun Apr 4 22:00:00 PDT 1999 — We experienced a denial-of-service attack this evening (apparently a SMURF) from persons unknown. While the target was nas21, offered traffic load from UUNet was in excess of 45 Megabits/sec, which saturated the T3. -Scott

Sun Apr 4 21:49:41 PDT 1999 — Our network is currently being attacked by persons unknown. I’m working with UUNet to resolve the situation ASAP. -Scott

Fri Apr 2 09:54:14 PST 1999 — We’re doing some testing on our equipment in Sebastopol in order to try to isolate problems which some customers are having with disconnections, failure to negotiate or slow speeds. If you are experiencing these problems with our new Sebastopol or old Forestville number, and if the test number below is local for you, please give this number a try and let us know how it performs.

Note that this new number is temporary, and will not hunt, so if it works well for you, give us some feedback and then when the main Sebastopol number is upgraded, change back to that number or you’ll end up with busy signals in the long run.

Sonic.net is not responsible for any telephone toll, so make sure that this number is local before trying it. The temporary test number is 707-824-9930. Please send feedback to pm3test@sonic.net as soon as possible, and if things look good, we’ll work on upgrading the rest of the equipment. -Dane and Steve

Thu Apr 1 18:12:12 PST 1999 — An April Fool has taken it upon themself to broadcast messages to customers on the shell server which claim to be from Sonic.net staff. To prevent this annoyance, we’ve turned on ‘mesg n’ in the systemwide profile for now. If you wish to use the ‘talk’ or ‘write’ commands, you’ll need to turn on ‘mesg y’. If you’ve got any feedback or questions, please post to news:sonic.net. -Scott