Thu Aug 21 11:00:17 PDT 1997 — We will be doing a number of upgrades on Sunday the 24th starting at 2am PST. Upgrades include the news and web servers, and we’ll also be moving the news disk array and also the FTP server. Power is being re-routed for two terminal servers and our network switch. We should be finished with all of the changes by 7am, and service downtime should be minimal during the upgrades.

Tue Aug 19 15:42:26 PDT 1997 — As you may have noticed, some parts of Sonoma County are currently without power, and we had a minor power problem here. Coincidentally, we also had a problem with the yp/nis system on thunder.sonic.net, and it was down for a quick reboot. So, web and ftp services were offline for a brief period this afternoon. We’ve moved the FTP server to a really big neato UPS. -Dane

Mon Aug 18 12:35:59 PDT 1997 — On Thunder (our web server), we increased some resource values in the kernel, replaced HTTPd with a new build, and configured the system to run with more simultaneous web processes. It’s behaving much better now (knock on wood. 🙂 It appears that the problems began when our number of visits suddenly doubled: Yahoo selected www.conceptlab.com/simulator/ as a Site of the Week! (Congrats!) -Scott

Mon Aug 18 12:27:59 PDT 1997 — We’re having continued intermittent performance on the web server, and we’ve decided to reboot the system, as it’s been online for about two months. It will be back online shortly, it’s currently checking it’s massive filesystem for errors. -Dane

Sun Aug 17 22:16:50 PDT 1997 — The web server is again having problems, this time with odd memory segmentation violations. It’s status program has paged us with a number of brief temporary outages this afternoon, and it’s watchdog routine has restarted it quite a few times because of this problem. We’re currently seeking the source of the trouble. -Dane

Fri Aug 15 19:00:51 PDT 1997 — The web server had some problems with it’s internal socket communications, and was unable to serve cgi’s for a brief time. All’s well now. -Dane

Fri Aug 15 06:24:37 PDT 1997 — AOL still hasn’t fixed their mail problem. We’ve isolated the problem to high-volume mailing lists, specifically: ‘sammyhagar’, ‘rent,’ and ‘vanhalen’. Sendmail has a terrible problem with delivery to high-volume mailing lists. This is a flaw in its design. Fortunately, we have alternatives to effect mail delivery. The most popular solution is ‘qmail,’ and it is very fast. We are now running qmail on our outbound mail server, which handles mail destined for sites out on the Internet. Apparently, once we implented qmail, the extreme volume and efficency of these mailing lists triggered AOL’s spam filters. This wasn’t obvious at first. To prevent mail bounces, we held all mail to AOL. Now that we know what their problem is, we are delivering all mail to AOL except the high-volume mailing lists mentioned above. Specifically, we’ve implemented a solution that defers mail _from_ these lists, _to_ AOL, while still performing normal delivery.

In other words, mail to AOL is now working, except for the high-volume lists. Please visit news:sonic.net for further discussion of the AOL problem. -Scott

Fri Aug 15 14:11:59 PDT 1997 — AOL has resolved the issue that prevented our lists from delivering mail to them, and mail is currently dequeueing to them like crazy. Our new delivery system has nearly all of the mail sent already, and the performance is impressive! -Eli

Thu Aug 14 14:24:55 PDT 1997 — Because of high mail volumes, AOL’s filters have decided that mail from us is probably spam, and they are bouncing a lot of mail traffic. AOL’s network operations has said that they expect to have this fixed within 24 hours, and until then we are holding all mail which is destined for AOL. We’ll keep you posted here in the MOTD. -Dane

Sun Aug 10 04:20:06 PDT 1997 — During our Sunday morning wee-hour maintenance period, we upgraded our Cisco 7010’s route processor. The Cisco 7010 serves as our gateway to the UUNet and MCI Internet backbones. Downtime was approximately 15 minutes. There’s a picture of the route processor at: www.sonic.net/expansion/fiber/page9.shtml (the route processor is the card in the topmost slot.)