Wed Nov 26 17:14:30 PST 1997 — Sonic is currently looking for new telephone technical support reps. If you’re interested, please see our employment web page at the URL below. Thanks!

www.sonic.net/employment/

Sat Nov 22 01:09:58 PST 1997 — We’ll be working on systems throughout the weekend, mostly during the ‘wee’ hours of the morning. Some systems may experience temporary outages as we perform the following planned tasks: Mail: System reboot with kernel change, mailing list migration ISDN: Router reboot (completing backbone transition to OSPF) Ftp: Change to ftp server daemon

As always, if you see difficulties, please mail support@sonic.net or post to news:sonic.help. Thanks.

Sat Nov 15 20:21:37 PST 1997 — Our shell server was offline twice this evening in what looks like an IP fragmentation denial of service attack. We are currently building a new kernel which was released about 30 minutes ago to fix this trouble. We will be rebooting once in a few minutes to put this kernel online. -Dane and Scott

Thu Nov 13 17:59:33 PST 1997 — At 10am on Tuesday, we re-activated the circuit to MCI. Our new mailing list processor, Afterburner.sonic.net, is ready for action. We’re working out how to move mailing lists to the new box with minimal disruption of service. -Scott

Tue Nov 11 05:21:41 PST 1997 — Just before 5am, UUNet security blocked the attack at their network’s border. Currently, we’re running with our MCI circuit shut down, leaving us with the UUNet and Sprint circuits. (Please note that we do have connectivity to MCI customers via the alternate circuits.) -Scott

Tue Nov 11 03:56:58 PST 1997 — Our network is currently receiving a denial of service attack — specifically, a UDP flood. Some sites will be unreachable while we track down the Bad Guy. -Scott

Sun Nov 9 21:11:23 PST 1997 — Dane and I have been looking at the new Pentium bug this weekend. Since all of our user-accessible servers are now Pentium-Pro or better, Sonic isn’t vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks resulting from this bug. The bug only affects P5 and P5mmx processors. CNet has been most informative in the early stages of this story. For more information, please visit www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,16173,00.html For ‘raw footage’, you might want to see news:comp.sys.intel -Scott

Wed Nov 5 17:57:51 PST 1997 — We’ve been having some problems with our mail server this afternoon, and we’re keeping an eye on it. Basically, it’s causing itself to exit periodically, and we’re trying to work out why. No mail is being lost, but delivery may be delayed, and if you have trouble sending mail, try again in a few minutes. -Dane

Fri Oct 31 18:53:50 PST 1997 — Don’t miss our Halloween special home page at www.sonic.net/ – if you are reading this after it’s gone, you can see the scary logo, staff photo and road kill mouse animation at:

www.sonic.net/halloween-photo.html

-The Sonic Staff

Wed Oct 29 05:39:46 PST 1997 — We’ve completed the move of our web data onto the Network Appliance, our new high-performance network file server. Previously, we stored web data on a RAID-5 attached directly to the web server — so, to ensure that this change won’t impact filesystem performance, we’ve made sure that the web server (Thunder) and the NetApp (Fridge) communicate using 100Megabit full-duplex Ethernet.

This is ‘stage one’ of moving our web system from its current model (one server, a 256MB Dual-Pentium-Pro) to a new model: a brood of PPro’s and Pentium II’s cooperating as a ‘web cluster.’ We’re pretty excited about the scalability and redundancy from this architecture (which you may have noticed if you read the news:sonic.net newsgroup :). -Dane and Scott