Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - June 2003

A hard man is good to beat

May

This is the 75th edition of the Website Newsletter.

May is the month of the darling buds; it started off that way, but towards the end, it became "phew what a scorcher". My main activity this month has been running around to deal with the problem I suddenly got with telecoms, see the full write-up later in this newsletter.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Shopping Mall

The Server Farm

The chatroom, the message boards, DNS for the cookie cutters, the older Older Newsthumbs (but not the latest Older Newsthumbs) and some other assorted bits and pieces, were all being done at Chesham, linked to the internet via a 2 megabit line leased from British Telecom to a service provider in Aylesbury.

The service provider was relocating to Stoke Mandeville, so they told me to get BT to move the line. I told them to please make sure that they were all set up at Stoke Mandeville, then I'd move it. So, they got that sorted out, then got back to me. I then initiated the line move with BT.

BT sent me a form, I filled it in, and faxed it back. The office sent it to the people who do the work, and got an email back from them.

After a week or so, I called BT to find out about progress. They'd lost the form.

BT then found the form, and put the work back onto the plan, this time with high priority.

On the 17th May, I woke up to find that I was completely cut off from the net. My ISP had moved. My contact at my ISP was totally surprised that this meant that I was cut off, he thought we still had a few weeks to get the line move completed.

And, apparently, there was no way I could be reconnected at their old site. All this took me a few hours to discover, of course. And, being Saturday, BT offices were closed.

I have a fallback. I have two DSL lines, each with 1/4 megabit out, 1/2 megabit in. In this situation, what counts is the outbound speed. Whereas before I was using a 2 mbit line, running at about half capacity, now I'm down to 1/4 mbit.

Everything at Watford was unaffected, so the main site worked fine.

First, I had to put a firewall on the DSL line. I haven't bothered with a firewall before, because it uses NAT, you can't access inward. I use it for doing backups of the site in Watford. So, I configured a "Sonicwall" firewall I had from back when the site was in Maryland, and connected things up.

It took me several hours; I had to tell each server about the new gateway to the internet, and I had to tell the firewall what to allow through and to where.

I moved the chatroom and message boards to Watford to a spare server I had there. So, everything that was on Freya, is no longer running from Chesham. I've been thinking of doing this for a while now anyway.

By 1 am BST, I had everything here configured, meaning my DNS servers (which are needed for the cookie cutter sites) and my Secure Server (needed for signups). But not email. I spent about three hours trying to get email working, before I finally decided that it wasn't a problem at my end. So I called my ISP, and they said yes, they block SMTP (email service) to stop spammers, unless they can verify I'm not running an open relay (an open relay lets anyone use your server as a spam source). So I told them I'm not running an open relay, and they opened up SMTP for me.

The next day, I got my big firewall into action, replacing the Sonicwall. That gave me an immediate boost in performance.

When will I get my 2 megabit line back? BT tell me June 10th. I'm looking into the possibility of speeding that up, by one means or another.

But, I have not one but two DSL lines. So I started to work out how I could configure things to use both of them, because that would give me 1/2 megabit outbound. I found a way that involves using one of them for incoming requests, and both of them for incoming data. There's always ten times as much goes out as comes in (you can see that a request for a picture or video file is a lot smaller than the file itself).

And while I was doing that, I realised that the ISDN that I have, and haven't used for a couple of years (I kept it as a fallback) is twice the cost and half the capacity of a DSL. So I asked BT to convert my ISDN; when that's done, I'll add that to the lines serving Chesham. And I've also ordered a fourth DSL, I've worked out a nice way to use all four of them. When that's in place, I'll have 1 megabit outbound, which is as much as is actually being used of my 2 megabit line. The routers for connecting DSL to ethernet are only $50 each, a terrific bargain.

And I'm planning to build a box that will connect to all four DSLs at one side, and to my network on the other side, which will sort of combine the four DSLs into a single feed. I think it's theoretically possible, it's a question of working out the details.

Lessons learned:

1. I need to mirror my DNS at Watford.
2. I don't need the ISDN that I had for backup, the DSL does that.
3. I am *so* pleased that I had this DSL!
4. I had a sudden crash course in internet routing.

Drive failure

I'm still working my way through the drives that have failed in various computers over the last few years. It's because I discovered that the claim-under-warranty procedure is really very simple and easy to use. So, I've been trading shiny new drives for broken old drives, with maxtor playing the part of the lamp vendor. I've done a couple of dozen so far, and i've still got a few left to weed out. If you have any failed Maxtor drives, I can thoroughly recommend trading them for new ones, free of charge, provided they are still under warranty (which used to be three years, but now they've reduced it to one year, and I can see why).

Another recommendation - if you have Maxtor drives that are starting to show bad sectors, but you don't want to try the warranty return route, you can download a program (called PowerMax) from the Maxtor web site that does a low level format of the drive. I tried that on one drive with a few dozen bad sectors, and it made it look like new.

Cameras

Nothing new.

The Newsgroups

The volume of Newsthumbs these days is so great that I have 750 gb accumulated in just two months. I made the current server into Older Server Number 8 in early May.

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!

6 in 1 Kitchen Gadget - it whips, flips, and grips

Can I use it in the bedroom?

Are you a victim of the low deposit interest rate of the bank?

Do you choose to bear quietly or seek the method  ?

Quietly, my cross-eyed bear.

shed while you sleep

But then I'd miss all the fun of assembling the shed, and painting it.

QUILTS! QUILTS! QUILTS!

YES! YES! YES!

News about Jett

As many of you know. Stacy Jett, one of the best and most popular session wrestlers, has cancer.  Jett is a great person - to know her is to love her.  Her cancer is very serious and is also causing her financial difficulties.  If you are interested in helping Jett please consider sending donations to Jett at:
    Stacy Jett
    3300 Rio Vista Dr.
    Bonita, CA  91902

You might also want to make a pledge to contribute $50 for every session hour that you have this year and send it to Jett.  Both session girls and guys can participate.  I am sending $50 for every session hour that I have to Jett.  Olga is sending $50 for every session hour she gives to Jett.  If you want to take the pledge, send a note to Jett's Message Board. 

Also, I am putting together a fund raiser event for Jett.  I am new at this so please bear with me.  At this time I am thinking about August 2-3 in the LA area.  Maybe some girls from San Fran can come down.  (Both Helen VM and Suzie Johnson have said they will help.)  I am hoping we can have audience matches, video production, session, and more.  Please e-mail me with any ideas.  Many of the girls and session guys I have contacted have expressed interest.   I will have an update next month and watch Jett's MB.

I do realize that our efforts can not cover all of her medical bills of course, but every little bit helps, and the emotional support she receives can not be underestimated.

And please send your thoughts and prayers to Jett.

Thanks, "pin me"  stubblefield_john@yahoo.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

In the Chatroom

New feature - the Valk-signal. There's two ways you can use it. You can go to http://call.thevalkyrie.com or you can use it from the chatroom with "/valksignal on" and "/valksignal off".

It uses the stuff I developed a long time ago for remote control of computers, and which I then used for the Robot Arm. What it does, is switch on a signal light in my office, and if I'm in there, I can log into the chatroom to see why I was called. It could actually control a searchlight that shines onto the clouds, but Batman already did that.

Useful? Not very. Cool? Totally.

Chatter of the month

Fresh meat! barca1999 is the top chatter this month.

On the Message Boards

This month, we had 3457 posts to the boards.

Back Page

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

At the end of May 2003, there were about 623,000 pictures (35 gigabytes), 93 gigabytes of video, 7100 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 129 gigabytes.

To the Magic Carpet