Thu Sep 18 14:35:31 PDT 1997 — Pacific Bell is just about to end an installation discounting program for 128k and above Frame Relay dedicated circuits. If you are thinking about a full time connection, you can save about $700 by ordering before September 26th for installation before December 31st. If you’re interested, please email ec@sonic.net or call 522-1000 x201 for details. -Dane

Wed Sep 17 09:49:13 PDT 1997 — The very first modem in our X2 hunt group had problems this morning, and this seems to have affected the entire group. X2 was unavailable for about 45 minutes. We are currently programming a replacement modem, and X2 will be offline for about five minutes while we put that into service at about 11am. The modems are 16 port USR Total Control rackmount chassis, so when one port fails, you’ve got to replace the whole thing. -Dane and Brian

Update – the replacement unit is acting a bit oddly, and Brian is working on getting it to perform correctly. Sorry for the intermittant availability of X2 this AM. -Dane

Tue Sep 16 09:29:33 PDT 1997 — We had problems with a number of our terminal servers last night between about 12:15am and 2:15am. v.34 dialup was intermittently unavailable during this time. X2 and ISDN were unaffected. Thanks to Scott for coming in at 2am to work on this. -Dane

Sun Sep 14 19:28:03 PDT 1997 — We’ve got a new disk to put online for /home, but until it goes online, we need users to reduce usage. Please take a look around your home directory if you’re a shell user and clean things up a bit. -Dane

Fri Sep 12 11:29:15 PDT 1997 — We’re currently rebooting news.sonic.net to bring the new multiprocessor kernel online. We recently upgraded the news server from 128M to 256M of ram, and went to a dual PPro-200mhz motherboard. We’ve now enabled support for the second CPU. Enjoy!

Update – with the second CPU and some news server software tuning, the news system is screaming along. This is good stuff! -Dane and Scott

Fri Sep 12 09:54:13 PDT 1997 — A Sonic member has reported that they recieved an unsolicited telephone call from someone conducting a survey, and that they were told that the contact information had come from ‘Sonoma Interconnect’. We would like to assure our members that we do not ever release any customer information to anyone. If you have recieved a call like this we’d like to hear about it, please email support@sonic.net. If you get one in the future, please collect more information about what company they are, the person’s name, a callback number, etc. If you have caller ID or can use *69, all the better. Thanks folks. -Dane

Thu Sep 11 18:24:24 PDT 1997 — Pacific Bell has completed repair of the lines which were not hunting correctly. We also added 16 more ports here, so we should have no busy signals like we did briefly on Monday and Tuesday.

Thu Sep 11 18:23:30 PDT 1997 — In the first periodic Sonic Vs. IX Labs Softball game, Sonic was soundly trounced by the superior athletic prowess of the IX crew. The final score was 29-21.

Tue Sep 9 22:06:27 PDT 1997 — Pacific Bell’s repairs on Saturday went well, but now we’ve had other minor troubles. Sonic added 64 new X2 lines to our dialup group a few weeks ago, and put hardware on some of those lines on Friday of last week. Unfortunately, the lines were not properly configured when they were installed by Bell, and they were not used when the group got full on Monday night. So, Monday and Tuesday evening we had some intermittent busy signals. Bell has promised repair by early AM, so we shouldn’t see this any more. Previously usage has been kept low by Bell’s capacity issues (see previous MOTD, Sep 3 1997), so this wasn’t an issue until their internal fix on Saturday. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, but Bell’s doing a good job! -Dane

Wed Sep 3 17:22:18 PDT 1997 — Pacific Bell is having some problems with capacity in the Santa Rosa main office equipment (OE) which serves Sonic. During times of peak loading, we’re noticing a fast busy signal which indicates an inability to complete a call. Update: Pacific Bell has scheduled equipment changes and upgrades in their central office for Saturday morning between 8am and noon. These changes are happening up in the 300+ lines of our group, and these lines should not be in use at that time. We’ll keep an eye on things to make sure that it all goes well. -Dane