In an ongoing effort to provide the highest level of network and IP services to our customers, we will hold a network maintenance window tonight night, August 8th between 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM.

The purpose of this maintenance window is to move access layer links in our C2 datacenter to more powerful distribution switches.

Customers will notice short periods of connection latency lasting no more than a few minutes and/or TCP session resets as traffic is stabilized on the new switching platform. In other words, “sites will be slow”.

Servers themselves will not be affected or brought offline. This work will related only to the switching units (network connections) that feed the servers.

Are you wishing for some cooler weather yet? Before you know it we will be in football season then inundated with holiday ads. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves we would like to take a few moments to toot our own horn about some of our recent accomplishments, drop some exciting news and take look at what lies ahead.

RECENT LAUNCHES

We have been very busy over the summer and look forward to cranking out several new projects in the coming months. In case you missed some of our recent launches:

The Population Institute
This project was a complete rewrite of everything: infrastructure, design, content, content management, donation process and membership management. In a departure from our previous coding standards, we switched JavaScript frameworks from Mootools to jQuery. Both frameworks are very powerful and perform many of the same functions but it is always good for developers to have a varied arsenal of tools available. Their new donation system now accepts international donations! See the site at www.populationinstitute.org and blog.populationinstitute.org

Anthony Foxx for Charlotte Mayor
While we did initial development on the site, the campaign looked to take the site’s design and focus in a different direction. We worked with the campaign to come up with a fresh new design, direct integration with their e-mail blast software and better utilization of the Zend Framework’s YouTube application interface. Visit the site at www.anthonyfoxx.com.

Artists United for Health Care
Another client brought to us through Evolve Strategies (www.evolvestrategies.net), Artists United for Health Care is an initiative by LINC Philadelphia to provide affordable health care to artists. Evolve Strategies provided the design and Sononaco provided the back-end development through the Drupal Content Management System. See the site at www.artistsunitedforhealthcare.org.

Richard Aborn for Manhattan District Attorney
We are proud to launch and host the web services for Richard Aborn’s campaign for Manhattan District Attorney. Double Agent Design (www.doubleagentdesign.com) provided the design services and Sononaco hooked up the Zend Framework/Zend Server powered back-end to connect the web site contribution and volunteer tools with NGP. Check the site out at www.abornforda.com

APCO International
Sononaco has been working with the Association of Public Safety and Communications Officers (APCO) International for about the past year. We have worked to keep things up and running for them while developing new web initiatives for the vast services they offer their members. Just last month APCO moved their server hosting to Sononaco. There are a lot of more exciting things coming up for APCO. Josh and Sumi have been working like gangbusters (that’s a joke!) on the site. Visit APCO at www.apcointl.org

WE’RE EXPANDING!

We are very excited to announce that we are opening another office! To better serve our DC area/Amtrak route clients we are opening an office in the Washington area. The new office opens next week (the week of August 3rd) near Fort Myer in Arlington. The new address is:

Sononaco, Inc.
2300 N. Pershing Drive
Suite 201-4
Arlington, VA 22201

The new office has plenty of **free** parking, is located just a block from Route 50 and is an easy 10 minute from the Court House or Clarendon Metro stations.

What does this mean for the Charlotte office? Nothing. Well, except it’s going to have a little less furniture and plants. 212 S. Tryon is staying where it is. And yes, both the 704 and 202 numbers will still work. Keith will continue to split time between both offices. However, he will not be available this Wednesday through Friday as the gets the new office set up.

What’s brewing in the lab?

We have several exciting projects that will be released over the next few months that you will probably hear us going on about. A few are:

A web site launch that has been in development for over a year and a half!
A new multi-user CMS-powered web site specifically designed to provide unique content in multiple languages
A new application that takes content on an external host and makes it available to users on a separate system with syncing ability!

That’s all for now!

Thank you to everyone for your continued business! We look forward to an exciting second half of 2009 at Sononaco!

–Keith, Josh, Sumi & Leigh

Below is our monthly uptime report for June 2009. While we strive for 100% uptime, sometimes issues arise.

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www.sononaco.com
Service: Sononaco 4
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
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www.spromail.com
Service: Sononaco 1
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
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64.237.99.32
Service: Sononaco 3
Outages: 2 (1 for Network maintenance, 1 for hardware maintenance)
Downtime: 1 hrs, 10 mins
Uptime: 99.84%
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mail.sononaco.com
Service: Zimbra Mail Server
Outages: 1
Downtime: 0 hrs, 20 mins
Uptime: 99.95%
Downtime was documented and was due to mail server upgrades.
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[Hosted Client]
Service: [Hosted Client]
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
————————————-

During the iPhone 3G S launch, Sononaco President Keith Hall was interviewed while waiting in line at the Clarendon Apple Store in Arlington, Virginia.

Watch the video on YouTube (recorded with the new iPhone).

After a two-and-a-half hour wait we received the phones. Unfortunately, it also took about an hour for AT&T to active one of them.

Below is our monthly uptime report for May 2009. While we strive for 100% uptime, sometimes issues arise. Fortunately due to the configurations we have in place for our hosting, no data was lost.

————————————-
www.sononaco.com
Service: Sononaco 4
Outages: 1 – 5/21 at 1:20 AM for 0.064 seconds
Downtime: 0 hrs, 5 mins
Uptime: 99.99%
————————————-
www.spromail.com
Service: Sononaco 1
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
————————————-
64.237.99.32
Service: Sononaco 3
Outages: 1 – 5/13 at 12:15 PM for 0.032 seconds
Downtime: 0 hrs, 5 mins
Uptime: 99.99%
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mail.sononaco.com
Service: Zimbra Mail Server
Outages: 2:
May 9, 12:40 PM for 25 seconds – Power cycling at the hosting center
May 15, 2009 at 6:32 PM – Hard drive controller board failure
Downtime: 3 hrs, 45 mins
Uptime: 99.51%
The outages were documented. Please see previous blog entries about the hard drive crash for more information on this incident.
————————————-
[Hosted Client]
Service: [Hosted Client]
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
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If even Google can go down, nobody is safe.

On Friday May 15th at approximately 6:30 PM one of the circuit boards went out on one of the three hard drives in our mail server. Our technicians worked quickly to repair the problem.

Unfortunately, the screws on the hard drive are a rare Torx type of screw. Our technicians had to track down the proper toolset to remove the hard drive.

Our mail server is running in what is referred to as a RAID5 configuration. What this means is that there are three hard drives in the server that share all of the data on the system as a single drive. We can lose two drives and not lose any data, because that data is shared across the three.

Once the hard drive was repaired the RAID array took about half an hour to rebuild and mail functions were restored around 10 PM. Any e-mail received during this time was eventually delivered over the next couple of hours.

We apologize for the downtime. With the new controller board installed on the hard drive we hope to avoid such situations in the future.

We are in the process of upgrading all of our hosted sites and codebases to Zend Framework 1.8.1. If you are a developer please be sure to update your local copy of the Framework.

Zend released version 1.8 of the Zend Framework around the first of May. Sononaco is upgrading the Zend Framework running on all of our servers. There are several notable changes to the code but there is one issue that needs to be immediately addressed: the Autoloader.

Beginning today (May 13th) we will begin upgrading the Framework on our staging/testing server, (at 66.240.223.252) and our Zend Server. All Zend Server sites have been upgraded to use the 1.8.1 bootstrapper. All site on the “dev” server include any site with the domain name beginning with “dev” or “staging”.

How does this impact you? Unless you ar a developer, not much at all. If you are one of the developers using the Zend Framework then you will need to do a couple of things:

First, update your local working copy of the site. Effective immediately all Application codebases in Subversion should contain the code for the 1.8 Framework. The 1.8.x Bootstrapper code is not compatible with versions of Zend Framework older than 1.8.x!!

If you run the new Application code against the 1.7.x Framework you will see errors so be sure to upgrade your local Framework to 1.8.x.

For the moment we are not upgrading existing bootstrapers or Application layouts to the new Zend_Application_Boostrapper. All projects going forward will contain the new Bootstrapper system.

You can download version 1.8.x of the Zend Framework here.

Our mail server was offline for approximately five minutes this afternoon due to an issue with the server’s power cord. The cord has been replaced and the server is functioning properly.

We apologize for any problems this may have caused.

Recently the Washington Post had an article that mentioned a web site that brings several talented logo designers together to try to create a logo for your business, organization, band, church, web site, blog, etc.

I find that creating a logo for yourself to be an impossible task. Such duties should be handled by the experts. Enter LogoTournament.

For $250 (to start) you take a few minutes to describe it is what you do, how you describe your brand, what you want and don’t want in a logo and how long to contest runs. Designers from around the world then submit logo ideas which you can “like” or “reject.”

At the end of the contest you receive a quality logo for a bargain price.

Our entries can be seen here. I invite everyone who reads this to either e-mail me or leave a comment here with your thoughts on the logo.

This is a report we receive monthly that reports on our hosting uptime. I thought this would be interesting to share each month.

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Below is your monthly uptime report for April 2009

Please do not reply to this email.
For further assistance, please contact support[at]siteuptime.com.

————————————-
www.sononaco.com
Service: Sononaco 4
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
————————————-
www.spromail.com
Service: Sononaco 1
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
————————————-
64.237.99.32
Service: Sononaco 3
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
————————————-
mail.sononaco.com
Service: Zimbra Mail Server
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
————————————-
[Hosted Client]
Service: [Hosted Client]
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
————————————-