Sun Oct 5 18:07:30 PDT 1997 — We’re beginning to enforce the 12 meg quota in the user home directory area, as that filesystem is getting full. There is a 12 meg soft quota, and a 24 meg hard quota. The soft quota has a three day grace period. Please make sure that your usage is below 12 megs, or you may suddenly find that you can’t write files when we turn this on late Monday afternoon. -Dane

Sun Oct 5 15:51:35 PDT 1997 — We’ve added 36 new modems and lines in the past two days. This extra capacity will help us during particularly busy times on Monday and Tuesday evenings. See the line utilization graph for details on usage: www.sonic.net/lines/

Sixteen more lines are scheduled for addition Tuesday or Wednesday, and more are on order with Bell. -Dane and Brian

Wed Oct 1 21:17:19 PDT 1997 — On October first we brought up a brand new T1 circuit direct to Sprintlink. This rounds out our direct connections, as we’ve now got direct fast links to the three largest backbones. This means low latency and packet loss, which translates to snappy, reliable Internet performance. This triad of circuits also means that our connectivity is sized so that an outage of any one circuit will not impact our network. Next time you’re shopping for ISPs, ask ‘are you connected directly to the big three?’

Wed Oct 1 21:09:39 PDT 1997 — We’ve had four major problems this evening. Busy signals were the first trouble – we’ve been adding capacity, but it seems that we’re not keeping up. We’ll be bringing more lines up tomorrow. The web and ftp servers were also offline for a brief time, and mail was a bit overloaded and slow. We’re scaling things up here, so we shouldn’t see more episodes like this. Sorry! -Dane

Wed Oct 1 20:34:47 PDT 1997 — We’re currently having problems with ftp.sonic.net and www.sonic.net. Both are currently being restarted right now, and should be back online shortly. -Dane

Mon Sep 29 19:14:55 PDT 1997 — We’ve had some problems this evening with interactions between deployed releases of Livingston’s ComOS, which runs on our dialup access servers (pm to pm15). This caused problems with our primary authentication server. Basically, too many requests were generated, and the access server wouldn’t wait for a delayed response, but would generate yet more requests. This resulted in a snowballing situation where the authentication server could not keep up. Our Computone equipment was willing to ask a secondary server for authentication, but the Livingston gear seemed to assume that if it could connect, it would get a response, and just kept asking for one.

We’ve upgraded the operating systems on all of these devices, and in the process, managed to boot lots of folks offline as they were rebooted. Sorry about that – if your connection got terminated tonight, that’s probably why. It’s for the greater good, as the new OS is more stable and shouldn’t have problems like this one. -Dane

Mon Sep 29 06:46:25 PDT 1997 — The popmail server at pop.sonic.net is back in operation. It stopped working just before 9pm last night. The pop server at sonic.net wasn’t affected, nor was outbound email. Our monitoring system didn’t see the problem. Currently, we watch the ‘inetd’ program on the pop server, which serves the pop connections for clients — unfortunately, inetd continued to operate correctly for everything but the popmail service. We will start monitoring the service directly. We apologize for the problem, and we’ll try to not let it happen again.

Mon Sep 22 23:31:22 PDT 1997 — I noticed sluggish performance on one of our terminal servers (pm14), and did a bit of packet dumping. It turns out that someone at osu.edu doesn’t like us, and was attacking our terminal server. I’ve filtered this host at our gateway, and have filed a complaint with odu.edu. I love Cisco IOS – it’s how the Internet works. -Dane (note correction – odu.edu, not osu.edu)

Mon Sep 22 22:42:18 PDT 1997 — One of our 18 network access servers went gone offline, and it just happened to be the first one. I’ve just rebooted it, and all’s well. Establishing a connection may have acted strangly for about 15 minutes. I’ve flashed up the OS, and at the next reboot it’ll be running the new version which should eliminate this type of crash. -Dane

Sat Sep 20 17:58:23 PDT 1997 — news.sonic.net was offline for a brief time this afternoon. The server software had some problems and exited. -Dane