Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - February 2003

A hard man is good to beat

January

Frost on the grass. And snow, at the end of the month, half an inch, with drifts of up to three-quarters. England grinds to a halt.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

Sheila Burgess is reading stories for you - look here for Pizza Girl and the Weightlifting Contest: Sheila reads ...

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Shopping Mall

A new Illustrated Book from LH-Art

A bunch of videos from DePriest Entertainment.

StoneColdMail

The email service is free to members. And there is no advertising

The Server Farm

Thanks to MikeAC for some of the ideas that I used below.

I did a major upgrade in Watford. I built three servers based on AOpen MX4GER motherboards, 3ware IDE controllers, 2.4 GHz Pentiums. I used Crucial and Corsair memory, because the unbranded memory mostly failed my testing, whereas the branded all passed. I used 250 gb Maxtor drives (I won't know if they're reliable for many months).

I built three servers like that to act as newsthumbs digesters; Alice, Belle and Carol. One of Belle's drives failed shortly after installation, so Belle will have to come back for fixing. Fortunately, I only need two servers. Well, it isn't "fortunate", it's called planning for computer failure.

To make space for them, I took out Kitty (had memory failures), Linda (didn't work from the day she was installed), Iniga (frequent disk failures), Ziggy (mysteriously very slow at ftping) and Yenta (had one drive failed).

Kitty got new memory and one new drive, Iniga got a new drive, and Linda got a new motherboard. And they're all back in service, but not in Watford, they're here where I can keep an eye on them. Yenta got a new drive (I replaced the dead 80 gb Maxtor with a new 120gb IBM drive, it's the first time I've used those), and is going back to Watford. And I'm building three more like Alice, to replace Belle and Joyce (who occasionally just stops working, so needs a good check-up). And the third one will be because I seem to score about two out of three when putting new computers up (and that's even after giving them an extensive test here).

I also added a new backend backup for the main site (Xenia), based on a MX46-533V motherboard and a Celeron 2.1, which is all a lot cheaper. And a new newsfeeder, news4, which is a backup for my main newsfeeded news3. News2 has been retired, it was a few years old, and didn't have enough drive space now that usenet has grown so much.

Also, Lizzy was retired (Lizzy was another Newsthumbs front end, but only a Celeron 800) and is being recycled into service here.

My big big objective here, is reliability. At the start of this month, I was getting up in the middle of the night, each night, to check that everything was working, and far too often it wasn't. One of the news digesters crashed, or the news feeder, or there was a corrupt file system, or something. Members weren't affected because of all the backup servers, but backup servers can only take you so far. At one point, I had three out of four news digesters out of action, and I was praying that the fourth one wouldn't fail before I got at least one of the other three up. Fortunately, the Great Pumpkin heard my sincere prayers.

I want systems that can run untouched for *months*, not hours. So one new policy is that all memory is being rigorously tested before it gets used. I found that quite a lot of memory has some small fault. That wouldn't matter in an ordinary computer (if it crashes, you just reboot). But in a server, that's painful.

And I've understood a bit more about memory. At 133 MHz, the cheap unbranded memory is unreliable. Even the branded isn't entirely flawless. But if you test it, you can find memory sticks that do work. And you can tell the computer to run the memory more slowly than it wanted to, if you find that the faster speed gives memory errors. I'd rather have a slightly slower computer that works reliably, than a faster computer that keeps crashing. But to make all this happen, you need a good memory test program - I'm using Memtest-86, which installs on a floppy disk, and to run the memory test, you just boot from that floppy.

I replaced my two 16-port ethernet switches here, with 32-port switches; they're only about $200 each now. I needed them because of the increase in the number of servers that I needed for my new policy of not merely having one server and one backup, but actually having two backups for each server. That's a lesson I learned from the great server crash where both older newsthumbs machines lost their data, which is because the 160 gb drives are *so* unreliable.

I added a heat sensor to my other cabinet, because I've added so many servers to the racks. And pretty soon, I found that it was too hot in the cabinet. So I took all the UPSes out of the cabinet, and replaced them with two stonking great 3000 KVA UPSes. Those weigh about 100 pounds each. Poor Mr Deliveryman! But it means that I got rid of the little heat-generating UPSes.

I've also now got a policy of, with the backup older newsthumbs servers, I leave them powered off unless I need to switch to them. It means that switching over will take a minute longer, but I don't expect to need to do that often, and if I know I'm going to have to switch, I can power them up in advance, so there isn't any hiatus. It means I can have less heat-making stuff in the cabinets.

I also installed two more KVM (Keyboard-video-mouse) switches, so that now I can control 32 computers with one single keyboard and monitor. The ones I use are only about $250, and take up very little space.

In the course of doing all those replacements, I noticed that I had a big pile of dead drives. And I realised they were still under warranty! So I'm sending them all back for refund or replacement. I'm hoping for about $4000 from that.

One of the Western Digital 200gb drives has failed - that's not a good sign, but not conclusive. However, since Maxtor are now offering 250gb drives, I'm buying those.

I also found a guy selling power cyclers at a good price, so I'm going to be installing remote power cycling capabilty on my servers here (I already have that at Watford). Why do I need it here, when I can just pop into the server room and cycle power? So that I can be away for a while, and still be able to do that with my servers here. A lot of computer problems can be solved by switching off the power, and then back on again. It's nice to be able to do that from thousands of miles away.

And how will I log in from thuosands of miles away? I'm thinking in terms of packet radio, the GPRS system. And that will mean I can go on a holiday, and not spend two weeks worrying that a server has crashed without me being able to fix it. I suppose I could hire and train an assistant, or something, but the advantages of being a one-Valkyrie company are great.

I backup the Newsthumbs servers in Watford, to servers here, using my 2 megabit Megastream line, and my 0.5 megabit DSL. But lately, newsthumbs has been running 100,000 pictures per day (it used to be more like 50,000) so my lines can only just cope. So, I'm ordering another DSL line; this one will be a 2 megabit (I hope), which will ease the backup situation.

It sometimes seems to me that no matter what I do on these computers, there's always a lot more to do!

Cameras

The Newsgroups

I'm getting 100,000 pictures per day (or more) on a lot of days, now. More to look at!

Spams of the Month

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!

New! Virus of the Month. Each month, I get sent hundreds of viruses. I don't know which ones they are, I've stopped bothering to identify them. So I don't know what they might do to a Windows computer - but I do know that it's safe if you don't open the attachements.

Occasionally, there can be something amusing about the virus, and I'll summarise those here.

I have not seen a Doctor in 15 years....

I know what you mean, there's never one when you need one, and then when you don't, there's three!

professional steak knife liquidation

You mean, I can order up a hit, right here on the net?

What's Your RealAge? Take the Quiz

A gentleman never asks ... a lady never tells.

Double the speed of your computer

Does it also cure baldness?

America's best kept Secret

I don't know what this is about, because obviously I'm not so ill-mannered as to read someone else's secret.

Virus of the month

Re: Here is that sample

I don't actually know what virus this is, but it's a good introduction-line. Especially when it comes from big@boss.com

Sponsorships

We currently have several running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan, Steph Parks.

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've sponsored Heather Foster, Kara Bohigian, Priscilla Ribic, KerryAnn Allen, Linda Cusmano and Jodi Miller.

The Clubhouse

New Message Board

• Shannon Logan

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

alphacentaurian, boomer and mikeac are way ahead of the others.

On the Message Boards

This month, we had 3953 posts to the boards.

Back Page

Fun with fraudsters

I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.

At the end of January 2003, there were about 606,000 pictures (33 gigabytes), 86 gigabytes of video, 6700 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 120 gigabytes.

To the Magic Carpet