Archive for August, 2008

Close shave

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

Negative Exposure Assessment Drilling Protocol Training I wonder what the people at the grocery store thought when staff member Matt Merner purchased more than twenty cans of shaving cream. I suspect they guessed he was planning some sort of late night pranks. That would be an incorrect assumption. Matt was ...

The San Francisco Manager Tools Conference.

Friday, August 29th, 2008

TweetKelsey and I have become big Manager Tools fans, and as such we jumped at the opportunity to attend the Manager Tools Effective Manager Conference when it came to San Francisco. Kelsey Cummings Augie Schwer We learned a lot and met a bunch of great people; I would recommend it to any Managers ...

Slaughtering the hogs

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

How much Internet is too much? Apparently it’s 250 gigabytes, enough Internet content to fill up a $55 hard disk drive. Comcast made news today by announcing a usage cap for Internet users. You can read more about it at PC Magazine. See also the DSLReports coverage. The reason ...

Punt!

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Sonic.net and BroadLink staff re-engineer BL network As mentioned in the status blog (formerly system MOTD), BroadLink Communications had a system failure in a critical component of their network today. A hard drive in their core router failed, and while they do have spare parts, they were unable to rebuild ...

New email Member Tools released today

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

We deployed the email portion of our New Member Tool suite this morning. Significant improvements have been made, particularly in the following tools: Graymail now features improved searching, sorting, and best of all, we’ve FINALLY added a message preview feature! Check it out at https://members.sonic.net/email/graymail. Our Spam Filtering Configuration tools have ...

Web cluster outage

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

At 12:55PM this afternoon, we experienced an outage of our main web cluster. Customer downtime was under 5 minutes. All services have been restored. –Don

BroadLink wireless outage

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

BroadLink is a wireless carrier partner for a group of customers in Santa Rosa and some surrounding areas.  BroadLink has had a failure of a critical component in the core of their network, and they are currently attempting repair. We have scheduled a meeting for an hour and a half from ...

Critical systems: Power backup

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Image via Wikipedia Obviously, an ISP doesn’t function without electricity, so we’ve got big investments in redundant power here. A datacenter power system consists of multiple inputs which are arbitrated by a transfer switch, and multiple loads such as UPS systems and air conditioners (CRACs). The primary input is PG&E, and the ...

When Perl and RPM don’t get along.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

Sometimes when building rpm packages you will get an rpm that requires a file that it already contains. This seems pretty lame (which it is) but here is an example and a workaround. Building a package for freepbx we see this output: rpmbuild -ba freepbx.spec --------snip----------------- Provides: config(freepbx) = 2.4.0-0 Requires(interp): /bin/sh /bin/sh Requires(rpmlib): rpmlib(CompressedFileNames)

New features added to our DNS Editor tool.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

We have added the ability for our customers to edit their Reverse DNS in our DNS Editor Member Tool: https://members.sonic.net/websites/nameservers/host_records This tool works for anyone with IP Address services with us; be it Colocation, Leased Server, DSL, or anything else with an IP address tied to it; you can now use this ...