Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - September 2002
A hard man is good to beat
Wow, what a hot month August was! And did you see the Valkyrie Garden Cam? But summer isn't over yet - now it's September, we have late summer to enjoy.
Galleries added this month.
Welcome to Bandit, who writes illustrated stories.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
I notice the count is 205, added in just the one month!
Two Physical Culture videos for the price of one! Choose a tape, then pick another one. Both videos will be recorded onto one tape, and you'll only be billed for one!
New video from Kasie Cavanaugh - School Girl Crush. All you bullies enrolled at Thy High! Do NOT pick on Kasie's little brother, Cesar! Buddy the bully violated this warning and now must face the consequences as Kasie's huge MUSCLES will come to Cesar's rescue!
The email service is free to members. And there is no advertising
At the start of August, I got Emily ready to become Vnews08, the fifth old news server. And then, on the 7th, disaster struck!
The way my news system works, is that all the incoming newsfeeds are funneled through one news server called News3 (dual pentium 600 processors and 500 gb of SCSI storage). News3 uses multiple sources to try to get as many news articles as possible. Also, it means if one source is down, there isn't a total news-drought. This means that News3 is not only a funnel, it's also a choke-point in the system, a "single point of failure". And on August 7th, News3 stopped working.
I did all the usual things; cycled the power and so on, but to no avail. So, that evening, I threw a screwdriver in the back of the car and motored down to Watford to see what was wrong.
It was a dark and stormy night; lighting flashing and thunder crashing, and floods, because our road drainage system can't cope with half an inch of rain. Drama. And as I got close to the Watford data center, the road was totally blocked by a flood, and I needed to go around it. And wouldn't you know it, I hadn't brought a map. I mean, I've been this way so many times before, why would I need a map? So I cast about at random through the back streets of Watford, in the middle of a thunderstorm, until I eventually found a route around the flood that got me to the data center. Drama. They were having their own little flood there, too, apparently. But nothing too serious, meaning nothing that would make my computers wet!
We pulled News3 out from the stack of computers, no small job because it was right at the bottom. I opened it up, and I found that when I powered it up, there was a few seconds of life, then it died. "Power supply", I thought, and I tried swapping the power supply for one I'd brought with me, because I'd suspected it might be that. No dice. Nothing. Dead computer. Drama.
While I was there, I took out Lorna, who's been acting up for months, and re-installed Daffy; just another backup for the main web site.
Feeling well dischuffed, I took News3 back home with me. The thunderstorm had gone by then, the stars were out, it was a fine night. By the time I got back, it was too late to do any more. I make a practice of trying not to do complex things when I'm tired; you can wind up with a lot of negative progress that way. But I did think about the possibilities, and as a stop-gap, I put News2 as the news-funnel. News2 is a somewhat smaller (72 gb, and a single Pentium 600). Maybe that would be the answer? Or maybe a new motherboard for News3, or maybe some other solution.
By next day, I had a plan. Plan A was to replace the motherboard of News3 with a dual-processor Pentium 1000 board out of Yenta (who is now retired). I also had to replace the power supply. And I couldn't use the old Pentium 600 processors, because they're slot-type, the old fashioned type. These days, all processors are socket-type. So, even if the old Pentium 600 processors still work, they're just junk. Oh well. But after I put in the new motherboard, I found that I couldn't boot up the computer. Grrr. So, I put in another drive, and installed Linux on that. Then I could boot off the new drive, and I could access the data on the old drives. But that's not a state of affairs that you can use as a news server.
After wasting a few hours trying to get News3 working, I decided to go to plan B. I have a computer at Watford called Acola; 500gb of disk, and a Celeron 1200 processor. Originally, I made it to see how much disk I could get into a 1U (1 3/4 inch high) box, and having made it, it seemed a shame to not use it, so it's been sitting in Watford ever since, acting as yet-another-backup for the main server. I used a Celeron 1200 because they make less heat than other processors, and in a 1U box, the height limit means that you can only use a rather wimpy CPU fan. My thinking now, was that that Acola could be my news funnel.
That idea worked well. I reformatted the drives (I had them configured as a Raid, and that's a silly idea for a news server), installed my news-gathering software (called Dnews), and started things up. And I could see the news flowing in nicely. I let that flow for several hours, then I triggered the first batch of newsthumbs. That worked OK, although the crop was light, on account of the news having flowed in for only a few hours.
My thinking now is that News3 isn't going back into service. Why do I need a clunky great 5U box at Watford (where space is an important consideration for me) when I can do the same job with a nice neat 1U box? So, Acola is going to be the new News3, and most of the old News3 is scrap.
By August 10, I had the new systems established. The current newsthumbs became Older Server number 5, located here, and a new server started for the current newsthumbs (actually an old one reformatted).
And then I got a new problem. People started telling me that the chatroom and the message boards were slow.
The first thing I did, was work out how to interrogate my router for how much it was passing through. That means I can now just take a quick look to see what's happening. The next thing I did was to add stuff to my firewall, to monitor each of my computers and see what the bandwidth usage is. That's one nice spin-off from having made my own firewall, I can make it do things I hadn't thought of when I first made it. And then, when it had been running for a while, I made it draw a graph showing me the bandwidth usage over time.
This revealed that sometimes, I was pulling about 10% more bandwidth than I thought I actually had! But when that's happening, it means that the line is clogged up, and people will started feeling that the parts of the site on that line (chatroom, message boards, older newsthumbs) are slow.
Someone on the other side of the world, who had a fast internet connection, had started up a "download manager" and told the software to download everything on my "older server number 5". What he possibly didn't realise, is that it's like drinking from a fire hose. There's getting on for a terabyte of data there. Well, I don't mind about him downloading a terabyte of stuff, but unfortunately, he was clogging up my entire connection to the net by doing that.
So, I've put on a limiter on that person, to stop that happening in future.
If you're interested, you can see the thing I call the "web site heartbeat". The green line is data going in to my computers at Watford (your requests for stuff, and me uploading stuff). The blue line is data going out (pictures and video mostly, going to your browser). There's also the "web site heartbeat" in Chesham - that's where the old news, the chatroom, the message boards and some other stuff is located. Both of those charts are updated hourly (actually, they're updated once per minute, but I only snapshot them hourly.
The Watford one is boring. That's good! There's 100 mbps of bandwidth I can use, and you can see it almost never gets as high as 25% of that.
Chesham is more interesting. I have less bandwidth there (so I put the low-bandwidth stuff there). The exciting green line is the daily backup; it takes about 8 hours each day, starting at 4am GMT. The blue line is outbound data, and I'm using about 25% of the bandwidth most of the time, sometimes up to 50% with the occasional spiky peak.
BA has a Mavica now.
One of the newsgroups that has become a lot better after I put in Yenc and multipart posting, is alt.binaries.pictures.comics
Members of this web site will be especially interested in Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Mary Marvel and other superheroines you'll find there.
I don't make these up. These are actual spams sent to me, which just strike me as funny. I don't include their
contact details - go find your own spammers!
FINAL NOTICE ! Y O U R immediate $1000 COMMISSION !
I wish it was. I got eight of your "Final Notices" today.
I never sent you this - keep it hush hush!
I won't tell anyone if you won't.
Make your toilet paper talk!
I'd rather not - I don't think I'd like what it would say.
you are my favorite vuqxljridmh
I say, that's jolly nice of you!
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.
And we're sponsoring Heather Foster, Kara Bohigian, Priscilla Ribic, KerryAnn Allen, Linda Cusmano and Jodi Miller.
The latest Valkyrie Playoffs has just been launched. This was run in Sydney. And the winner was Michelle Gilham, with Tanya Leggatt, Anna Bellas and Monique Jordan as runners up.
And we're a major sponsor of the Women's Strength Extravaganza this year. There will be a bunch of folks frmo the web site attending, if you go, make sure you meet up with them.
I see advertising all over the place (spam, banners, popups) for internet accelerators (sometimes called download accelerators, or download managers). Obviously I don't take any notice of these, but it occurred to me that maybe some people do. What do they do? Are they useful? Do they really make the internet faster?
First, let's be clear. If your modem runs at 56 kbps (56 kilobits per second, 7 kb per second) then nothing will make it run faster. At that rate, a 1mb file takes 143 seconds to download. Actually, if you have a 56k modem, you probably don't get the full speed from it, because it has to slow down for noisy phone lines, and you're probably getting 5 or 6kb/second (200 or 167 seconds per megabyte).
I have a DSL line, which runs at 500 kbps. That works out at 62.5 kb per second. I actually get 56 kb per second, which I think is very good. That 1 mb file will download in 18 seconds. There's nothing that will make it faster (unless I buy a faster DSL connection, costing more).
So, what does a download accelerator do? Well, suppose I'm about to download a 10 mb file. This is going to take 180 seconds with my DSL. The download accelerator makes twenty connections to the server instead of one. But does that make the download 20 times faster? No, because each of those connections is sharing my 500 kbps DSL, and only runs at 1/20 of the speed that it would run if it were alone. So, the download accelerator downloads the file in 20 pieces, reassembles it into one, and it *still* took 180 seconds.
Where a download accelerator can help, is if the bottleneck isn't your DSL line (or modem). If you're connecting to a server that only allows a limited download speed (say, 50 kbps), then your 500 kbps DSL will be limited by the server you're downloading from. If instead of one connection, you open 20, then each of those 20 will be pulling 25 kbps, so it won't get limited. Sounds great! But that will only apply for servers that are heavily loaded (which limits the bandwidth you can get) or which have a restriction on each connection's bandwidth.
My servers aren't heavily loaded. According to the "web site heartbeat", I'm running at well below full loading. So, there's no benefit in using a download accelerator on my site. But there's a couple of downsides.
First, the extra work that the download accelerator does by opening up dozens of connections, means that the total download speed will be less. Secondly, if the download accelerator is really aggressive about this, then my server could interpret it as an attack, and shut off access by your computer for a while.
I can't speak about the effect of a download accelerator with other servers. But I suspect that most of the time, a download accelerator has no effect at all.
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 can check out the message boards that have had the most posts recently, the Top Ten Message Boards. Thanks to TomNine for that suggestion.
New Message Boards:
We had a special guest appearance from Captain Corc - it was good to see the Old Codger again!
Member | Posts |
| pamela69 | 6953 |
| scottf001 | 6816 |
| cry2cin | 5658 |
| mikeac | 5574 |
| boomer444 | 5204 |
| easybreather | 4933 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 4493 |
| shanice82 | 4307 |
| tre1313 | 3752 |
| alfiekins | 3670 |
| evan100 | 3446 |
| GrappleJack | 3365 |
| manc1973 | 3305 |
| jabb6328 | 3206 |
| Drop | 2601 |
| JohnDavis | 2595 |
| TomNine | 2478 |
| gaily304 | 1981 |
| buffy18976 | 1876 |
| gee1407 | 1719 |
Pam is top chatter this month, although ScottF was hard on her heels. Hmm, maybe that's poor phrasing. Crystal, Mikeac and Boomer werea bit behind them.
In August, we had 3775 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The FBB board has retained it's first place. | zig563 leads the roster, with many familiar faces filling the rest of the top ten. |
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. The FBB board is ranked high again ... | ... but TomNine's board is the one that actually gets read the most. |
You've probably been wondering how to deal with the problem of the empty toilet roll
August 10, the main server was busy - the total download was 100 gigabytes, in nearly 800,000 hits. It was even bigger on 26 August - 145 gb in 820,000 hits. Definitely a record.
And now there's "Older server number 5", covering January 30 to August 6.
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of August 2002, there were about 578,000 pictures (30 gigabytes), 80 gigabytes of video, 6100 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 111 gigabytes.
Newsthumbs is now over 100 million files! More than 3 terabytes of pictures! But I'm installing 1.9 terabyte servers now :-) So far, I have three of those monster servers, and another one just being loaded.
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 |
| Older 5 | 8.5 | 687 | 13.7 | 34 | 22.2 | 722 |
| Latest | 1.2 | 140 | 1.9 | 3 | 3.1 | 143 |
| Total | 44.9 | 3207 | 71.2 | 163 | 116.3 | 3419 |