Friday morning, between the hours of midnight

Wed Jan 20 20:43:12 PST 1999 — Friday morning, between the hours of midnight and 6am, we’ll be doing some major maintainence here at Sonic. Specifically, we’ll be moving all critical servers into a different rack with centralized protected power, adding capacity to and upgrading the operating system of the Network Appliance fileserver, and upgrading some miscellaneous server hardware. All services maintained by the Network Appliance will be affected. This includes web hosting, FTP, and mail. Dialup and network service will not be affected, though dialup and shell users will be temporarily unable to access their email. The interruption should last from 3am to approximately 3:30am. In addition, there will be a number of sporadic (maximum 30 minute) service interruptions between midinght and 6am while various servers are moved and/or upgraded. These interruptions will include: Usenet news, web, and FTP service. -Dane, Scott, Brian, Devin, Eric, Ian, Asa

On Monday January 25th, we’ll be changing the

Thu Jan 14 09:26:14 PST 1999 — On Monday January 25th, we’ll be changing the default login service from shell to PPP. This will affect current shell users who are using a dialup terminal program to reach the shell server. Starting now, please use ‘username.shell’ to log in and reach the shell server – after the 25th, logging in as ‘username’ will serve PPP by default.

This only affects customers who dial directly up to the shell server. SSH and telnet sessions are not affected. PPP users who use ‘username.ppp’ are not affected.

For ease of typing and memory, we’ve also enabled ‘username.sh’ and ‘username.unix’ to shell access. Please begin using ‘username.shell’ or one of these alternatives immediatly. -Dane

Buzz, the new mail server.

Thu Jan 7 19:50:10 PST 1999 — Buzz, the new mail server. Yesterday morning’s test of the new mail server (making it ‘prog-relay’) went well, except for a few problems: most importantly, email for support@sonic.net was either deferred or bounced for a few hours. (Sorry about that — and thank you, Eric, for figuring it out. 🙂

At 2am, January 8th, we will let it handle mail for _just_ the sonic.net domain. Email for other domain names won’t be affected.

Again, transitioning to the new server should be seamless, and should require no action by Sonic members. (With one exception: folks using complicated .forward files may want to examine ‘man dot-qmail’ on Bolt.) -Scott

New mail server testing.

Tue Jan 5 17:50:27 PST 1999 — New mail server testing. We have completed installation and configuration of ‘Buzz’, our new mail server. This system will eventually replace Sub, our old mail server. Transitioning to the new server should be seamless, and will require no action by Sonic members.

At 2am, January 6th, we will point the ‘prog-relay’ host alias at Buzz, which will only affect those members who use prog-relay. (If you don’t know what ‘prog-relay’ is, then you won’t be affected. 🙂 This will allow us to observe the system delivering real traffic — if there is any trouble that can’t be immediately corrected, we will revert to the old system. -Scott

All offsite remote access equipment has been…

Thu Dec 31 11:10:11 PST 1998 — All offsite remote access equipment has been upgraded to ComOS 3.8.2. This does not affect equipment located in Santa Rosa. This version (just released) fixes many connectivity problems. For a full list of fixes, you can check out the release notes at ftp.livingston.com/pub/le/upgrades/release382.txt.

Sonic would also like to wish all of you a very happy New Year and best wishes for a prosperous year ahead! -Brian

Above.net had a systems crash at…

Wed Dec 23 15:25:34 PST 1998 — Above.net had a systems crash at approximately 2:30 PM today that affected dial up access to some areas in the South Bay. The outage lasted for about 1 hour. They have resolved the problem and our Above.net POP is now back online. -Brian

Between about 1:50pm and 2:11pm, one of our…

Sat Dec 19 15:36:32 PST 1998 — Between about 1:50pm and 2:11pm, one of our web servers (‘Storm,’ www.sonic.net) stopped serving web pages. Investigation reveals an almost certain explanation: a CGI program caused the system to become ‘swap-bound’ (that is, doing a lot of work using disk-based virtual memory).

Our web servers run CGI’s within specific resource limits; but as it turns out, one resource limit remained unset on Storm — RLIMIT_AS, the ‘address space’, or virtual memory, limit. That limit is now set, so we shouldn’t see this problem anymore. (Nevertheless, we’ll keep a weather eye out for any more problems with Storm. 🙂 -Scott

Network connections for nas21 and nas22 have…

Fri Dec 4 13:45:14 PST 1998 — Network connections for nas21 and nas22 have been moved. We also utilized the opportunity to upgrade nas21’s power system so that its capacity may be agumented, as well as giving it a much-needed firmware upgrade. Multilink PPP across chassis (MPIP) seems to be working much better now.

Bolt’s move went well, and it’s been upgraded to a Pentium II/450 with 256mb of ram (the old system was a PPro-200/128), and has also been moved from 10mbit to 100mbit switched ethernet. There should be a noticeable performance improvement, especially during periods of heavy usage. The new system also includes redundant power and cooling, SMP capability, and a spiffy deathstar-black rackmount chassis. 🙂 In other news, while we were moving bolt, sonic.sonic.net (the primary authentication/DNS server) started having some swap corruption problems and needed a reboot. There should have been no noticeable reduction in service, since the secondary auth/DNS server (boom.sonic.net) was functioning properly. Also, the news server (ultra.sonic.net) had filesystem troubles, and some local posts may have been delayed while it was repaired. -Scott, Brian, Devin, Eric, Ian, Logan, Eli, Dane, Asa, Kat, and Arak (who doesn’t really work here)