Thu May 8 11:09:08 PDT 1997 — We had some stuck talk daemon processes and decided to reboot the shell server to get rid of them. The server was offline for about 3 minutes. Also – folks, please don’t run persistant processes like ‘eggdrop’ and other bots and daemons.

Thu May 8 01:11:37 PDT 1997 — Important: As the next step in our attempt to stamp out SPAM and UCA mail, I’ve implemented filters which restrict our dialup users from using off site SMTP (mail) relays. As all dialup customers should be using ‘mail.sonic.net’ as their SMTP relay, this should not affect you, however if your email client software is misconfigured to use someone else’s mail relay, you’ll need to change your settings. The goal is to avoid making Sonic an attractive place to SPAM from – by requiring users to use our relay, we can avoid remote relay abuse. If you have any questions about this, please do post to news:sonic.help and let us know.

For more information about SMTP and POP, please see: www.sonic.net/info/relay/

Wed May 7 23:12:54 PDT 1997 — Two of our terminal servers had some problems with very high network load – seems that someone at the University of Delaware doesn’t like us. We also had a seemingly unrelated problem with our mail server which forced us to reboot it. Mail services were unavailable for about 15 minutes. Nothing like a little excitement, egh? -Dane

Sat Apr 26 17:52:27 PDT 1997 — The main ISDN Portmaster has had some ongoing intermittant problems, and I’ve just upgraded the operating system to fix the documented bugs. The 3.3.2 operating system has been replaced with 3.5, and there’s a large list of bugs that they’ve squashed. Sorry for the poor, intermittant performance, particularly this AM. -Dane

Fri Apr 25 10:06:37 PDT 1997 — UUNet, Sprintlink, MCI and other major backbone carriers had massive routing instability which affected us. Basicly, a Sprintlink customer was announcing that they were the first class C of every classless (CIDR) block on the Internet, and UUNet and others were listening to them. This customer says that it was actually one of their downstream customers, and that they’ve taken that customer and their routers offline. They’ve blamed a bug is their main Bay Networks router for a bug in it’s announcement filtering. Eventually, routes converged, and the network stabilized. -Dane and Scott

Fri Apr 25 09:28:35 PDT 1997 — UUNet is having massive routing problems ‘nationwide’ which are affecting us. It seems that a Sprintlink customer is announcing that they are us, and UUNet and others are listening to them instead of us. We’re working on this now.

Fri Apr 25 06:15:28 PDT 1997 — For the last two days, we’ve been implementing enhancements to our mail servers’ policy enforcement. A most important update: third-party relay has been disabled on our mail servers. Please read www.sonic.net/info/relay/ for details. I’ll also make a post to news://sonic.general -Scott

Wed Apr 23 00:52:11 PDT 1997 — We uncovered a bug in our Cisco 7010’s operating system (oh, lucky us) that caused problems with our 45Mbps HSSI interface. (The HSSI input queue ‘wedged’ during a reboot.) We’ve upgraded the router’s operating system (IOS – ‘THE’ Internet Operating System, it’s the way the world works) to Cisco’s latest release, 11.0(14a)). -Dane and Scott

Tue Apr 22 23:54:13 PDT 1997 — Our DS3 is back up. It turns out we’ve uncovered a bug in our Cisco 7010’s operating system (oh, lucky us). We’ve adjusted the router configuration so as not to trigger the bug, and rebooted. We’re currently getting our ducks in a row to reload with a new operating system. -Scott and Dane

Tue Apr 22 22:22:46 PDT 1997 — Our DS3 is still down. It turns out we’ve uncovered a bug in our Cisco 7010’s operating system (oh, lucky us). We’re currently getting our ducks in a row to reload with a new operating system. Meanwhile, our backup DS1 with MCI is operating correctly (although it is very busy.) -Scott