Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - July 2002
A hard man is good to beat
My lawn is infested with rabbits. Well, to be accurate, I think there aren't that many. I've only ever seen three at once, but I suspect there's several lurking in my shrubbery. They are dear little bunnies, and great when roasted. I also get deer wandering around sometimes, I guess the black-and-white from next door isn't patrolling as much as she used to.
Galleries added this month.
There's a new bookshelf for Vampire, and one for Wildstar. And I added a "Top Bookshelf" to the Top Twenty lists, so that you can see who are the best-loved authors.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
A new video from Kasie Cavanaugh - Muscle Beach Heat
The email service is free to members. And there is no advertising
Lots of mega problems this month, but I don't think any of them would have had much impact on people surfing the site, on account of the way I have a spare backup standing by for pretty much everything. So, the problems were all mine :-)
On June 1, Tilly went down. Tilly and Karen are the backup servers for the Newsthumbs, Nadia is the main server that everyone uses every day. If a backup server goes down, it's no big problem. Tilly just kept rebooting over and over; I planned to just leave her there, and I brought up Lizzy, who was doing nothing at all, to take over as a backup server. When I got Tilly back for checking, it looks like the motherboard isn't working any more. So, I took the hard disk, CPU and memory, put it all in another motherboard, and it seems fine now.
Then, June 4, Nadia went down. As far as I could tell from a distance, the main hard drive went bad. So, at that point, Karen had to carry the load, with Lizzy as backup in case Karen goes down. It makes me think that my policy of having two backup servers for each main server, is actually useful. When I got the server on the operating table and looked at it, two of the four cooling fans has gone pearshaped, making an absolutely horrible grinding noise, and the hard disk was a very unhappy bunny.
The hard disk is definitely hosed, I tried to reformat it. No problem, I replaced it, reloaded Linux, and now Nadia is back in action.
On June 8, my firewall at Chesham stopped working, and nothing could get in or out. That means that chat, message boards and the old Newsthumbs weren't available. Or member sign-ups! It took me a few hours to realise that the firewall was stone dead, because a firewall is just electronics, no moving parts at all, and so that will never fail, right? When I finally realised that it was the firewall, I quickly took down my experimental DSL line, and took the firewall off that, to do the more important job. That's a junior version of the same firewall that failed, so I could just plug it in and it worked. And that gave me time to think about a longer term answer.
First, can the firewall be fixed? I opened it up and had a look inside. Probably not, there's nothing there that looks replacable. I contacted the company, but 25 days later I hadn't heard back. So, clearly I need a new firewall. Here's the options.
There is no option "don't use a firewall". You'd have to be crazy, or extremely clever, to run servers without one, and I am neither of those.
The only problem with the junior version I was using, was the capacity. It isn't designed for high volume, and although it is designed for the amount I was putting through it, I was still a bit concerned.
The advantage of replacing the failed firewall with one the same, is that I won't have to think too hard about the installation and configuration; it's exactly the same as what I already have. The disadvantage is that I just had one fail totally, do I really want another one from the same folks?
The Pix is tempting, but expensive ($3000 or more). And I've installed a Pix before, that's what I use at my main site in Watford. But it means I'll probably have to reconfigure about 50 computers.
Making my own. How could anyone resist this? A firewall is actually just a computer, which you tell "Allow this" and "Stop that". You put in three ethernet cards; one leads to the big outside world, one to my local network that no-one should ever access from the outside, and one to a "DMZ", which will be the computers that people are supposed to be able to access from outside, like the Secure Server for membership signups, and the chatroom.
Linux includes a thing called "IPTables", which is a way you can tell the computer the rules that you want to enforce. I looked around the web; it didn't seem to be outrageously difficult. It looks like loads of people use this for firewalling. So, I decided to at least try to make my own firewall. If it turned out to be too difficult, well, the Junior was keeping things running while I was doing all this, and I could pony up for the Pix if I really had to. I called a couple of vendors to get quotes for commercial firewalls - interestingly, by three weeks later, no-one had got back to me. Don't they want to make a sale?
First, I built the computer. That was easy, see my article last month. The only difference, was I put in three ethernet cards instead of one. Linux installed with no problems, recognised the three cards, and my firewall hardware (costing about $300) was now ready for action. I set up a mini-network, with one computer to represent my local network, and one to represent the DMZ. And I tried to get those two talking to each other, via the firewall. The little network looked like this:
"Local computer" - Switch 1 - Firewall - Switch 2 - "DMZ computer"
It wasn't as simple as I'd hoped. It turns out that you not only need to use IPTables, but you also have to understand routing, you also need to enable ARP-caching, and one of my switches was playing fast and loose while I was doing all this, so things that might have worked, were stopped working when the switch was playing up. But, eventually, after messing around for a couple of days, I worked out how to get those two talking to each other via the firewall. Having the flashing lights on the switches really helped, it told me whether packets (pieces of data) were going through or not, and how far they were getting.
The complexity was increased by the fact that I have two main sites where I have computers, and I wanted to permit somewhat freer communication between those two groups, than between my computers and the whole outside world.
Now the big step - connect to the world. I added a switch to my world connection, so that normal service could continue, and also connected that switch to my new firewall, to the ethernet card that led to the outside. I then spent a couple of days wrestling with that before I finally got that working. Routing ... netmasks ... and then I found out about ARP caching - when I changed a computer from the old firewall to the new one, my router thought it was still on the old one, and tried to talk to it there. Imagine this. The router says "Who's Spartacus" every now and then, to find out where the various computers are. But it thought Spartacus was behind my old firewall. And so the router sends data to the wrong place. So, once I realised that, it was easy to fix, I just told the router "You don't know where Spartacus is, ask again". And this time, it asks "Who's Spartacus", and the old firewall says nothing, and the new firewall says "I'm Spartacus". This is "clearing and re-initialising the ARP cache", and if it's explained somewhere, I couldn't find it.
Advanced networking isn't that different from magic. You say the incantations, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't and often you don't know why. But it's very satisfying when it does work.
So, on the 16th June, I had a working firewall; I'd tested it every way I could think of, I'd checked that it could handle 50 times the load it would be asked to take, I checked that it blocked things that weren't supposed to get in, I checked that it allowed in stuff that should allow in (like chatting). Now all I could do is procrastinate. Do I trust what I've done, or do I think it's too difficult, and I might have made some dreadful mistake? Time to decide - fish, or cut bait? I decided to "Go fish".
So I switched everything over to the new firewall, told the router to clear the whole ARP cache, and rushed over to check that the web site elements were working. The chatroom was OK, and the message boards. But the old Newsthumbs weren't responding. I had to clear the ARP cache again to make that work, I think the old firewall got in first with the "I'm Spartacus". And then the old Newsthumbs worked.
Looking good. Time to check the firewall logs.
It was at that point that I discovered two things. There had been a lot of stuff floating in to my network that the commercial firewall hadn't bothered to tell me about. And there were a few holes that I had to open up to allow things to work that I'd forgotten about. Nothing major, but, for example, I found out what ports AOL uses by reading my logs, and until I'd opened that up, AOL didn't work. So, I made all these little adjustments, and it continued to work fine.
On June 19, I decided that it was all working so well, that I'd build up another firewall very like the first one, so if the first one dies, I can just swap in the reserve. The second firewall was based on an old Pentium 266 box, two which I added three ethernet cards. It took me about an hour to build and configure, and the cost is about $50.
Then I attacked the firewall. I set up a computer outside, and ran an attack against my own network, trying to see if I could hack in to it. This is called "ethical hacking" - since it's my network, there's nothing wrong with me trying to hack it. And, of course, it tests to see if I've left any holes. I didn't find any. That doesn't mean there aren't any, of course.
At the end of June, Jayne started misbehaving. She was core-dumping, and crashing, and showing all the symptoms of a hardware problem. Jayne is the main membership-facing server for the web site, and I can't let that be flaky. So, I switched to my new Athlon-2000 super-duper-fast box, Daffy. And Daffy immediately started to complain that the load was too high. You what? Daffy is twice the speed of Jayne. Eventually I gave up on Daffy, and switched to Ivory, running at half the speed of Jayne, and Ivory seems entirely capable of carrying the load. There must be something wrong with Daffy - Daffy will have to go on the table so I can look.
This leaves me with Ivory as the main server, and Uschi as the backup spare. That's not enough spares, so I built a couple more computers, one to be the second spare for Ivory and Uschi, and one to be a spare without any assignment, Mabel and Norah. They're using the CPUs out of Abbey, and two of Abbey's drives, and a chunk of memory I had going spare. Recycling is good. They'll go down to Watford soon, along with Lorna (who had a bad drive last month, and has had the drive replaced) and Acola, a spare that puts half a terabyte in a 1U (1 3/4 inch high) case.
We bought another Mavica CD1000, for Tex to use, so he can cover shows and events in Texas.
I've implemented YENC on the Newsthumbs. There's only a few newsgroups that are using Yenc, but those newsgroups seem to be using nothing else. I've also tried to implement the assembly of multipart postings using Yenc.
I just loved this Find-the-Spam page
And now some of the spams I've been send this month:
NEVER BUY TOILET PAPER EVER AGAIN
With the HANDY-BIDET-KIT™
DO IT YOURSELF
Attaches to your toilet. Tighten two nuts and you're done.
Sounds painful. Very painful. Here, borrow my spanner.
If your home is served by a septic system, you will be
able to receive invaluable information on how to
eliminate pump outs, maintain the system properly for FREE !!!
Our packetge will cure problems such as backups, wet spots, odor, etc.
You can start this FREE trial by checking out our SPC program at:
Please takes a mintuet to fill out the form, and we will send out your free
trail packetage.
I tooks a mintuet to get the packetage, because those wet spots can be so embarrassing.
But it doesn't say it it's compatible with my HANDY-BIDET-KIT™
If you are looking for a no-brainer solution to making an additional
$50,000 - $250,000 per year, this is your ticket, if you qualify.
"If I only had a brain ... "
Say Goodbye to YELLOW, STAINED Teeth!
... THWHACK!!! ... byebye, teeth. Anything else you'd like me to remove?
All because of the Negative Calorie Diet!
A diet where you can eat as much as you want!
Negative calories, wow. But I want to go the whole way, I want to eat things that have negative weight, not merely negative Calories! Hmm, I wonder what negative chocolate tastes like?
We currently have several running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Julia Santana, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan.
We're also sponsoring individual events, and funding athletes to go to events with grant dollars.
We're also doing free hosting and free bandwidth for many of our sponsored women. Bandwidth can mount up to a large bill when you're running a popular web site.
We're sponsoring Roseanne Blackburn to go to the Canadian West Naturals. Roseanne plans to turn pro in the sport of boxing sometime in the latter part of 2001. Check out her Galleries on this web site.
We're sponsoring Kathy Connors to the USA in Vegas this July, and we're sponsoring two competitors to the World Powerlifting Championship.
And we're sponsoring Heather Foster, Kara Bohigian, and Jodi Miller.
Once again, we did the Valkyrie Playoffs. Please vote for your favourite, because the top two in the voting, win a $1000, and we shoot more video of them!
A few people have told me that they found my article on how to build your own computer interesting and useful.
Next month - how to build your own rocket to the moon ...
I redid the Top Twenty. Now there's also a top 50 and top 100, plus I've added the most popular Bookshelves to the top list.
You've probably noticed that I'm changing the web site banner occasionally, to honour various anniversaries.
New Message Boards:
Member | Posts |
| easybreather | 6632 |
| BrianT | 6101 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 5100 |
| armfan | 4914 |
| manc1973 | 4166 |
| tre1313 | 4163 |
| pamela69 | 4041 |
| cry2cin | 3879 |
| TomNine | 3864 |
| JohnDavis | 3732 |
| mit19237 | 3674 |
| levram0000 | 3339 |
| boomer444 | 2894 |
| clearwater | 2647 |
| Sheila.Burgess | 2513 |
| fistman | 2366 |
| jabb6328 | 2150 |
| js829 | 2070 |
| Drop | 1991 |
| envallc | 1945 |
TKO is top chatter this month, with Brian not far behind.
In June, we had 3905 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The Abuse board is a clear winner this month, because that's where most of the passionate political argument takes place. | Armfan just beats steve333 as top poster, with Bill Wick not far behind. |
Mavis is counting the number of times the message list is checked for each board. This gives a very different picture from the one above.
Most listed Board of the month | Most read Board of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| As usual, Fistman is top, but with TomNine has dropped again! To fourth place. Although there's not much difference between TomNine, TwoPossums and the FBB discussion boards. | The Grinch got the stats. But I've put an anti-Grinch thing in place, maybe we'll get the stats next month? |
It's good to see that the Boys in Blue are still alertly watching out for terrorist attacks
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of June 2002, there were about 543,000 pictures (29 gigabytes), 76 gigabytes of video, 5800 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 105 gigabytes.
Newsthumbs is now over 100 million files! 3 terabytes! But I'm installing 1.9 terabyte servers now :-) So far, I have three of those monster servers, and another one planned.
There's now five newsthumbs servers.
| server | Million pictures | gigabytes | Million Text files | gigabytes | Million total files | gigabytes |
| Older 1 | 7.7 | 471 | 11.6 | 29 | 19.6 | 545 |
| Older 2 | 7.5 | 497 | 11.2 | 25 | 18.7 | 522 |
| Older 3 | 12.0 | 839 | 19.0 | 43 | 31.0 | 884 |
| Older 4 | 8.0 | 573 | 13.8 | 29 | 21.7 | 603 |
| Latest | 6.7 | 501 | 10.8 | 29 | 17.7 | 531 |
| Total | 41.9 | 2881 | 66.4 | 152 | 108.7 | 3085 |