Thu Nov 19 21:42:15 PST 1998 — Starting around 8pm or so, our mail server was severely impacted by a tremendous influx of email. Someone spammed AOL from a forged domain name, and unfortunately, we host that domain. This means that the tens of thousands of bounce messages were returned to the domain owner’s mailbox. [As of Fri Nov 20 00:31:16, I’ve counted 23,000 messages so far. /sd]

That wouldn’t have been a problem — except, AOL’s mail server farm was all cooperating to deliver these messages. In other words: thundering herds of AOL mail servers stampeded Sub, our mail server. We resolved that by turning off connectivity between AOL’s server farm’s networks and us, and then slowly bringing up connectivity, allowing traffic to clear one network at a time. I’ll post more about that on news:sonic.general. -Scott

Thu Nov 19 20:34:52 PST 1998 — Our mail server is having some problems delivering to AOL. Scott is investigating & resolving the problem. -Brian

Sun Nov 8 17:45:57 PST 1998 — UUNet experienced a major outage across their backbone from ~9am until ~3pm today. Discussion on a network operators’ mailing list intimates that this may have been due to software bugs in two vendors’ routers — bugs which reenforced each other destructively, causing massive instability on the Internet’s global routing mesh. There are reports of instability on other backbones, but from our neck of the Internet woods, UUNet seemed hardest hit. We were able to shut down our connection with UUNet, and balance traffic between our Sprint link and CW (formerly MCI) link. If memory serves, the last Internet outage of this magnitude occured in May of 1997, when a new exchange point on the East coast created a routing loop in the global routing mesh. (They had passed BGP routes between borders using RIP, with exciting results: their router announced that it was easiest to reach a large chunk of the Internet through their exchange point.) We here at Sonic hope that the effects of today’s outage didn’t cause too much frustration; we will be evaluating the outage to determine how we can prevent those effects in future. -Scott & Dane

Wed Nov 4 18:08:10 PST 1998 — Sales information for DSL is available online now. Through the month of November, we’re offering $0 installation for new DSL circuits! Save the normal $325 installation fee by ordering soon. This new service allows speeds up to 1.5Mbps at very low prices. -Dane

www.sonic.net/sales/dsl/ (corrected, dj)

Wed Oct 28 14:33:35 PST 1998 — PacBell has had some trouble on our current Geyserville number, and Cloverdale customers are being affected. Per our previous note on October 19th, Cloverdale customers should transition to our new facilities ASAP. The old number is offline right now, but will be back in service in a few hours. Sorry for any confusion! -Dane

Mon Oct 19 21:27:24 PDT 1998 — The number which our Cloverdale customers are using is changing. Users need to adjust their settings for this new number soon, as the old number will be going offline in two weeks. The new number is 707-893-0174. As Sonic is not responsible for toll calls, you should call your operator to make sure that this number is local for you before using it. The new number offers v.34, ISDN, K56Flex and v.90 support. -Dane, Brian and Scott

Wed Oct 14 15:32:27 PDT 1998 — The Usenet news server crashed on Tuesday night at about 7:30pm, and was back online within about 15 minutes. Hoever, disk corruption from the crash meant we had to take the system offline between midnight and 2am for filesystem repair. Sorry for the interruption! -Dane

Tue Sep 22 17:29:36 PDT 1998 — South Bay & San Rafael POPs have undergone firmware upgrades to allow v.90 connectivity. -Brian

Mon Sep 21 15:49:14 PDT 1998 — v.90 customers: Please use 522-1003, the use of 522-1389 is depreciated and may result is busy signals. -Brian

Sun Sep 20 20:52:56 PDT 1998 — RBL back up. The Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) was down for about 9 hours, so you may notice more spam in your mailbox than usual. The problem: the RBL server failed; that service has been reimplemented on a new server. For more information about the RBL and MAPS, please visit: maps.vix.com/ -Scott