Wed Mar 10 00:05:52 PST 1999 — On Tuesday morning, Eli found a USR MP16i modem in our 522-1002 dial group in a fail state. This group serves overflow for our 522-1001 group during busy times. The modem failure meant that the unit was answering the line, but not giving a carrier. A reboot has fixed it, and we’re watching the unit for further trouble in the future. Hopefully this will clear up many of the troubles that users have had with the 1002 and 1001 dialup groups. -Dane

Mon Mar 8 18:21:50 PST 1999 — On Sunday, March 7th, at 1:15pm, an intruder gained superuser privileges on our shell server, Bolt.sonic.net. The intruder left a ‘backdoor’ program and a ‘sniffer’ program running. These were detected and shut down at 8:50pm.

Additionally, we’ve discovered (and closed) the security hole that was apparently used for the attack. We are continuing investigation to ensure that there are no other security holes that have escaped our notice.

Any users who’s passwords may have been compromised have been notified via email. Users who were using SSH or who were dialing up directly to the shell server were not compromised, only users who use telnet. For further discussions, please see the newsgroup news:sonic.net -Dane

Tue Mar 2 10:49:15 PST 1999 — Our first Lucent Portmaster serving the west county 823 and 887 numbers had trouble. It was failing to accept user logins. We’ve rebooted it, and have opened a ticket with the manufacturer to see if they have any diagnosis ideas. Sorry about the trouble logging in! -Dane

Sat Feb 27 10:01:48 PST 1999 — The equipment that services the 522-1003 hunt group stopped reliably accepting logins this morning sometime after 8:00am. I fixed the problem ~9:20am, and we apologize for the problem! – Eli

Tue Feb 23 14:55:06 PST 1999 — I’m pleased to report that we’ve got the additional capacity online on our xxx-0174 numbers. We’d added 50% more capacity last Thursday, but today we got even more – a doubling in capacity on these lines. This was needed – we were returning busy signals before we got this online. There were some technical problems getting these circuits up due to some confusion about location that the telco had, plus a single bad cable which caused problems with the last trunk. All’s well now. -Dane

Mon Feb 22 16:51:24 PST 1999 — Sonic is currently hiring part time technical support reps. We’re looking for friendly people who enjoy working with the Internet. Experience with Windows dialup networking, Outlook and/or Macintosh Internetworking is required. If you’re interested, please see the info page at the following URL:

www.sonic.net/jobs/tech.shtml

Mon Feb 22 16:50:23 PST 1999 — The half off pricing promotion on DSL circuits ends this week, so if you’re interested in DSL for your home or office, you can save quite a bit by ordering now. For info on DSL, see the web page at:

www.sonic.net/dsl/

Mon Feb 22 16:48:44 PST 1999 — Pacific Bell has had some problems with two of the four PRI circuits which service our Sebastopol and West county customers. This problems have resulted in some poor performance, and we’re working with PacBell now to isolate the trouble. Meanwhile, we’ve re-routed most West county callers to other equipment. If you’re dialing Sebastopol directly, you shouldn’t experience any trouble currently due to the light load there. We’re continuing to follow up with PacBell to get this resolved. -Dane

Mon Feb 22 16:46:41 PST 1999 — We’ve turned up 50% more capacity on our xxx-0174 numbers to eliminate busy signals. This was a bit bumpy, as the telephone complany had some problems with their routing. The new capacity was brought online on Thursday evening. We’ve got one more circuit which they’re working on, so this will be a doubling in capacity as soon as they get that online. -Dane

Thu Feb 18 15:57:13 PST 1999 — Another update – the phone company has found and fixed the trouble. They were in the process today of turning on new capacity and mis-routed the traffic on some dialup numbers to the wrong equipment. They’ve shut down these new trunks to fix the trouble, and are working on correcting the routing so that they can turn them back on in the correct location. -Dane