Approximately 8:00 AM Pacific time this morning, our primary router suffered a power outage caused by a bad UPS. The problem was fixed within 10 minutes, and all connectivity was quickly restored. We apologize for the downtime and are in the process of replacing the faulty UPS.

18 September 2001

There were many problems today. Most of them were traced to a new worm called "nimda", which spells "admin" backwards. The worm infects Microsoft-based servers, and then uses these machines to launch attacks on other machines. You can tell your account has been attacked by searching the access_log for attempts to access files such as cmd.exe or root.exe. Since we run Linux-based systems, our machines are not prone to infection, but the repeated hammering by other machines to access these non-existent files has caused some major slowdowns.

See: Nimda worm strikes Net, e-mail and New Nimda worm tenacious in attacks for further details on this new attack.

21 July 2001

This morning, around 9 AM, there was a router failure which caused most of our network to be down. It was back up again in about 45 minutes. Our main backup router is almost in place and should be active early next week to prevent further outages like this. We apologize for the downtime and are working hard to prevent further instances.

18 June 2001

From about 10:45 to about 11:45 AM Pacific time, we had sporadic problems with our main gateway router which caused some access problems. We are still investigating the problem, which on the surface looks like yet another denial of service attack, targeted directly at the router. We should have more details later today and apologize for any inconvenience caused to our customers.

12 June 2001

One of our DNS servers went down for a still to be determined reason, and this caused problems with access to some sites on our network. The problem has since been fixed, but we are determining what caused the other DNS servers to not respond in certain situations.

Update: upon further investigation, it appears that some sort of denial of service attack was attempted on the DNS server, and it was propogating to our other DNS servers. We are currently looking for a way to protect from this type of attack in the future.

1 May 2001

It is May 1st, and as promised, communist and anarchist hackers have systematically attacked Internet sites throughout the world. With their own form of virtual terrorism, they have brought many parts of the Internet to its knees, including parts of our network for periods of time.

The denial of service attack on our network lasted from about 12 noon to 8 pm this evening. However, once we determined the type of attack and specific target, we were able to filter the bombardment of icmp fragments at the router level at about 3 pm.

27 April 2001

Our web site just received a facelift. We've adjusted our service packages, so take a look to see if it's time to move to a different service level. Also, let us know what you think of the new look and our new logo!

9 April 2001

Our Savvis connection went down for about an hour early this morning. A trouble ticket was procured and the problem was rectified quickly. There was no downtime due to this problem.

19 March 2001

Due to a faulty piece of equipment on their end, we lost our Qwest connection for almost 24 hours. All traffic was automatically routed to our other connections and there was no downtime.

10 March 2001

Our third connection is up and running. In the event that any of our redundant connections goes down, traffic will be routed to the other connections automatically, thanks to the wonders of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP4) in use on our and our upstream's routers.

5 March 2001

We are currently in the process of turning up our third Internet connection. This one is through Sprint, and it is causing us a few problems. Please bear with us as we work out all the wrinkles. We hope to have all routing issues resolved by the end of the day. If you are experiencing slowdowns, it is probably due to this new connection.

9 January 2001

At about 1:00 PM Pacific Time, our redundant Savvis connection to the Internet abruptly died. Our other connection (Qwest) immediately took over all of the traffic. However, there was a problem with routing for certain IP addresses which took over an hour to resolve, so some sites could not be accessed during this time. A trouble ticket with Qwest was opened, and the problem was resolved by about 2:15 PM. As for the Savvis connection problem, it took their engineers several hours to track down the problem, which ended up being a faulty MCI DS3. They connected our circuit to another line and the connection was restored at around 4:00 PM. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to prevent such an incident in the future.

One of our UPS systems died early this morning, taking down some important equipment which caused outages for some of our customers. The problem was rectified at approximately 2:30 AM Pacific Time.

30 October 2000

It has come to our attention that many ISPs (including Earthlink and AOL) are beginning to block outgoing mail if you don't use their SMTP servers. If you can receive email but you are having a difficult time sending email, you might be experiencing this problem. For details on how to work around it, visit your Administration site http://www.seagull.net/admin/. Select the "Sending and Receiving Email" option and read the "Problems Sending Email" section.

7 September 2000

At about 9:00 AM Pacific Time, the machine that monitors our servers decided to shut some of them down. The problem was resolved at around 10:30 AM. The monitoring system will be replaced shortly with something more robust to prevent future problems like this. We apologize for the inconvenience.

31 August 2000

Our redundant Internet connections have been installed in our new Poulsbo office. We are progressing with the move of customer accounts. All customers will be emailed next month with exact details and times when their accounts will be moved. We hope to finalize the move during September.

19 July 2000

We're moving again! Effective August 1, 2000, we will be in our new offices in Poulsbo, Washington. The new move will give us much more space and more capacity to begin offering new products and services, which we will begin rolling out soon.

8 June 2000

We have just begun offering domain registration services through our new relationship with the OpenSRS domain name registrar. You can now register domain names for only $20/year. That's a savings of $15/year when compared with the current registration rates that Network Solutions charges. You can even transfer your existing domains to our new registration system. The transfer fee is $20, which includes a year of registration, added on top of however long your domain is currently registered for. For more information, visit the Seagull Networks Domain Registration System.

16 May 2000

At around 10:00AM, our primary DS3 connection failed, causing temporary loss of Internet connectivity. The redundant circuits kicked in soon thereafter, and full connectivity was restored at approximately 10:20AM. We apologize for the inconvenience.

5 April 2000

At around 12:05AM, a methodical denial of service attack was launched against our upstream provider, causing almost all traffic to come to a halt. This first attack lasted approximately 3 hours, and two smaller attacks were spotted at around 4:00AM and 5:30AM. After some major rerouting and protection, the situation calmed down around 5:50AM. Our upstream (www.internap.net) was not the only one affected by the attack, as several other major Seattle-area Internet access providers were also targeted.

19 March 2000

UPDATE At around 8:10PM, we were informed by our upstream provider that the network problem centered around an outage in the Sprint network in Seattle. This caused any traffic that normally flowed through Sprint to not reach our network. The outage did not affect customers whose network connectivity does not go through Sprint. Since Sprint has still not been able to fix the problem, and their failover routes are also not working, all traffic that normally flows through Sprint is now being re-routed around Sprint. This might cause suboptimal routes for some customers, but it cannot be avoided until Sprint fixes their network.

At around 6PM Pacific time this evening, we lost partial connectivity to the Internet. The connection came back around 7:50PM Pacific time. We are still trying to determine exactly what went wrong and will provide more information as it arrives. Thank you for your patience.

14 January 2000

We had a networking problem last night that caused our main DNS server to shut down. The secondary DNS behaved sluggishly during this time, causing access to customer web sites to be problematic. The issue was resolved around 12:30 AM. We apologize for the inconvenience.

1 January 2000

It's 1:29 AM Pacific Time, and it appears that we've made it into 2000 glitch free! Happy New Year everyone!

Well, here we are. The dawn of the new millenium. Well, actually, the millenium begins in 2001, but who's counting? Everyone will be celebrating tonight. Our celebrations here will be minimal, as we keep a close watch on our servers, and since the Space Needle party has been cancelled, it might actually be pretty quiet in downtown Seattle. After a thorough review of our systems, we don't anticipate any troubles cycling into to 2000, but who knows what will happen with the Internet in general. Anyway, we want to wish you a happy and prosperous new year! Good luck and God bless.

27 October 1999

At about 10:45 AM Pacific Time, the machine that monitors our servers went haywire and decided to restart most of them, including our primary DNS server. Because the primary DNS was offline for a bit, it made the other servers reboot more slowly, because they had to first timeout with the primary DNS before using the secondary DNS. Some customers were not affected by the problem, but many were. Total downtime for those customers affected was approximately 20 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience.

14 September 1999

Last night, the clipper server suffered a hardware failure. The problem was spotted and fixed, and the server returned to service at around 11 PM pacific time. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to customers who maintain accounts on this machine. On the plus side, it gave us an opportunity to upgrade the equipment, so it should be much faster than before.

10 August 1999

The autoresponder and redirection systems have been greatly improved. These services allow you to send automatic replies to email and redirect certain email to other outside email addresses. To see how you can take advantage of autoresponders and redirection, visit your administration page. If you don't know the URL of your administration page, visit http://www.seagull.net/admin/, and you will be directed to the right spot.

1 June 1999

We're finally and completely moved into our new facility in Seattle, Washington, and things are running great! Thank you very much for your patience during this transition process. With the new facility will come some new services, so keep your eyes open for announcements in the very near future.

7 May 1999

At approximately 11:00 AM Pacific, we encountered connectivity problems with our old network, causing connection problems for about 40 percent of our customers. Verio resolved the problem at around 12:20 PM Pacific, which was a problem on their end - static routes not being propagated correctly. These problems should cease as soon as our move to Seattle is complete. Completion should take place at the end of May, if all goes well.

10 March 1999

We are in the process of moving to a new facility in Seattle, Washington. This will give us much better bandwidth, redundancy, and security. All accounts will be moved eventually with a scheduled completion of May 25th. Although all customer IP addresses will change, service should remain uninterrupted during the duration of the move. If you experience any problems whatsoever, please contact us immediately.

Verio resolved the routing problem at approximately 8:45 AM Pacific. We apologize for the interrupted service.

16 December 1998

Our upstream ISP (Verio) decided to change AS numbers for our IP addresses (as well as many of their other customers) early this morning, which causes a change in their routing. Unfortunately, it appears that they did something wrong, and I am trying to get them to fix it, since half our our customers now have somewhat bad routing. We have an open trouble ticket with Verio and are trying to get this resolved as soon as possible.

2 December 1998

The faulty CSU was replaced late last night, and things are now back to normal. We apologize for any inconvenience that the temporary congestion caused.

1 December 1998

The storm of last week appear to have damaged one of our CSUs, which is giving out. This is causing bandwidth problems as most traffic is now flowing through only one of our T1 lines. The replacement CSU should arrive later today, at which point we will replace it, and things should return to normal.

24 November 1998

Early this morning, our area was hit by a severe storm which caused major telecommunication outages throughout this region of Washington State. Almost everyone in this area appears to have been affected by the outage. Connectivity was restored at approximately 3 PM Pacific time. We apologize for the inconvenience.

1 October 1998

Today marks our second anniversary, two continuous years of offering high-quality web hosting services. Thank you for making us as successful as we are, and here's to a great year ahead!

25 September 1998

At approximately 3:20 AM Pacific time, the "sixties" server experienced a hard drive crash. All files have been restored, and the server was again operational by 6:15 AM Pacific time. We apologize for the inconvenience to those of our customers with accounts on this server.

14 August 1998

The pop servers have all been upgraded to use QPOP 2.53, which fixes some security problems. Please let us know if you encounter any problems with mail retrieval.

12 August 1998

For those of you looking for a more secure way of establishing telnet connections to our servers, we have just installed ssh. You will need an ssh-capable tool in order to take advantage of this.

27 April 1998

The bandage server suffered intermittent problems this weekend, causing some connectivity problems. We temporarily brought the machine offline and fixed the problem. It should be working fine now, and we apologize to customers who might have experienced p roblems during the weekend.

21 April 1998

We suffered a major disruption in service today when US West, our circuit provider, lost an OC-12 circuit due to a misplanted power pole. The outage affected many of the accounts we host. A trouble ticket was issued this afternoon and followed up by us every half hour until the problem was resolved. Connectivity was restored at approximately 8:30 PM this evening. We sincerely apologize for the downtime and are looking at ways to prevent this type of problem from happening again.

7 April 1998

We've just updated our terms of service (TOS). If you are a current customer, please review the changes at your earliest convenience, as it may affect your account.

19 March 1998

We are in the process of switching our primary connection to the Internet. The new connection will be faster and more reliable than our existing connection. It will also give us better redundancy. The downside of this switch is that everyone's IP address will change. If you do not know what your IP address is, then you are probably fine. This IP address change will be transparent for most of you, so you won't need to do anything special. It should only affect those of you who are referencing IP addresses specifically, which you really shouldn't be doing. If you have used your IP address in any of your html or cgi files, then you will need to change them as quickly as possible. If you must continue referencing your IP address, please email support@seagull.net, so we can let you know what your new IP address is. The IP address changes will occur by the end of next week. So, please remove any reference to the old IP addresses in your files before that time.

15 February 1998

US West lost a piece of frame relay equipment at around 5PM Pacific. This caused our primary Internet connection to go down, as well as the connection for many Seattle-area businesses. The connection was restored at around 7:22PM Pacific. We apologize for the inconvenience.

3 February 1998

MAE-WEST, which is a major peering point, had serious problems from this weekend until late this afternoon. Due to these problems, customers who connect to our sites via MAE-WEST may have experienced intermittent connection problems for the past several days. Hopefully, this problem is now resolved.

30 January 1998

Early this morning, we experienced an area-wide power outage that caused our primary T1 connection to go down, causing access problems for most of our customers. We were working with US West to get the connection back up, and everything was working at about 8 AM PST this morning. Even though we had backup power, it didn't help because our servers could not communicate with the rest of the Internet. I am told that the type of T1 circuit we have (frame relay) is prone to such outages. Because of this, we have signed an agreement to obtain a point-to-point T1 circuit, which is not prone to power outages. We are going to get this circuit installed as soon as possible and apologize for the inconvenience caused by the outage.

1 January 1998

Happy New Year! We at Seagull Networks would like to wish you and yours a safe, healthy, and rewarding new year.

We have been experiencing intermittent server problems all week long. The problem seems to be the result of a methodical attack on our network. After consulting with security gurus, we have implemented some fundamental changes in the way our network is accessed. This should not affect our customers. If you encounter a problem accessing any of the sites we host, please let us know immediately by emailing support@seagull.net. Although due to security risks, we cannot go into the details of what has been done, we can tell you that all of our servers are now running Linux kernel 2.0.33, which protects us against many of the latest attacks. We will keep you informed of updates as they happen.

11 December 1997

Things are almost back to normal. Rainbow is working fine, and we are implementing a new backup system (details to follow). However, today at about 6:00 PM, we temporarily lost our main connection to the Internet. The problem lasted for several minutes, and the connection was restored at about 6:10 PM. We apologize for the inconvenience.

6 December 1997

Disaster struck at about 10 PM last night when one of our servers (rainbow) had a major hardware failure. All the other servers on our network were unaffected by this outage.

1 October 1997 Today marks our first anniversary! 302 customers and counting! Thanks to all of our wonderful customers who have helped us make it this far.

28 September 1997

We suffered a major connectivity outage last night. The cause of the outage was traced to faulty US West equipment (they provide our T1 connectivity). Although we still had connectivity, the outage created major problems with one of our routers, which ended up dropping over half the incoming packets, causing difficulties in getting to our servers. US West was able to resolve the problem early Sunday morning. We apologize for any downtime our customers might have experienced.

19 August 1997

At about 2PM Pacific, we encountered a problem with a hard drive in the rainbow machine. The problem was fixed by 3PM.

11 August 1997

We are now at the 200 customer mark! That means we've doubled in size since April 2nd. Thanks to all of our customers for their support!

10 August 1997

We've upgrade all of our machines to 64 megabytes of RAM, which make them faster and more responsive. We've also installed a new virtual server machine (bravery), bringing our virtual server machine count up to 4 (rainbow, herring, sixties, bravery). Today also marks the day that we added a new class C IP address space to our network (209.43.192.0), and bravery is the first machine to make use of this new set of IP addresses.

17 July 1997

Someone at the InterNIC made a mistake which caused a major outage on the Internet today. The information in the root level name servers was corrupt and caused domain name lookups to fail all over the place. The problem persisted throughout the day until late in the afternoon.

7 July 1997

The main drive on rainbow was failing and was replaced this evening. The server was down for about five minutes during the replacement process.

27 June 1997

This morning, our main name server decided to respond like molasses on a cold day in December. This caused access to virtual web sites to be unusually slow and also caused sluggish email. The problem was spotted and fixed at around 9 AM.

8 June 1997

US West was performing some unscheduled maintenance which caused us to go down for almost two hours today. After some frantic telephone calls, our service was back up and running. We are investigating ways in which we can prevent such events in the future

20 May 1997

We have just put up some information on counters and how to use them on your pages. If you want one of those "we have had 2345 visits since yesterday" messages to appear on your pages to tell visitors how popular or unpopular your site is, these instructions will come in handy.

1 May 1997

We've just rolled out new packages, new prices, and new features! For more information, please visit our Services link. Packages begin at only $10 and include plenty of standard features. If you've been waiting to get your site up, now is the time. Also, if you have a site with us and want to move to a different package, email support@seagull.net, and we'll take care of it for you.

29 April 1997

The rainbow server went down at approximately 7:30 am Pacific this morning. The problem was caused by misuse of cgi programs. The server was back in operation by 8:00 am. No other servers on our network were affected by this problem.

28 April 1997

If you have any package that supports a domain name, you now have access to easy-to-use autoresponders. Autoresponders allow you to send out information automatically, based on someone emailing a certain address at your domain.

23 April 1997

One of our name servers went down early this morning, causing a few problems with site access. The problem was found and fixed this morning.

2 April 1997

We've reached the 100 mark in customers! We've grown tremendously in the past few months, mostly due to the great referrals we have been getting from our existing customers. Thank you!

17 March 1997

Our T1 connection to AccessOne is now in place and functional. US West was tremendously helpful in getting the connection set up this quickly. I am told that it usually takes an average of six weeks to get a new T1 connection. Thanks goes to John Boyce, the US West technician who was able to get things going so quickly.

28 February 1997

We have signed an agreement to receive high-speed Internet access from AccessOne in Kirkland, Washington. AccessOne maintains redundant T3 connections to UUNET, MAE-EAST, and MAE-WEST, the major peering points on the Internet. What this will mean is faster, more responsive connections for our customers. We'll let you know as soon as the new circuit is in place.

20 February 1997

Sprint has a buggy router in Stockton, California, and our ISP gets service via a connection to this router. This Sprint router is the cause of major problems, as it has the habit of losing its routing information frequently. Today, our routing tables seem to have fallen off the face of the earth, and it took almost an hour for things to correct themselves. Our network was OK, but was not reachable during this time, since no valid routes existed.

19 February 1997

Due to problems which seem to be related to Sprint upgrading their network, some sites on the Internet were not able to reach the virtual sites we host. If the remote site relied on Sprint and did not have a redundant connection elsewhere, the connection was refused. Unfortunately, our ISP has only a connection via Sprint. The problem went away in a few hours, but was a frustrating experience.

2 January 1997

Another Sprint-related outage occured. We are seriously looking for another ISP so this recurring Sprint problem won't affect our customers.

The beginning of the worst storm of the year. Thank goodness the year is almost over. Snow, usually a rarity in these parts, was falling with great fervor. Power went out all around the Puget Sound as windstorms and snowladen trees took out power lines. Power spikes were frequent, and many ISPs were shut down for longs periods of time, including the ISP that provides our connection to the Internet. Our own network survived unscathed, but we went down for an inordinately long amount of time, due to our ISP being down. Service was resumed once the ISP tech people were able to snow plow their way to their office and reset equipment.

16 December 1996

We are now up to 50 web site customers. Thank you for your continued support!

4 December 1996

An outage occured today, due to a faulty Sprint router located in Stockton, California. Access to the web sites we host was affected for approximately two hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

12 November 1996

Today, we officially announced our sponsorship of the Word Services web site, located at http://www.wordservices.org/. If you are a developer on the MacOS or BeOS platform, please visit this site for some interesting information about how to add word services to your products.

31 October 1996

Ten customers and growing!

2 October 1996

We've added our first web site customer!

1 October 1996

The official launch date of Seagull Networks. No web site customers yet, but we have lots of new equipment, a T1 connection to the Internet, a new network, and high hopes.