Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - November 2003
A hard man is good to beat
Valkyrie at sea! This newsletter is out a bit early, because I'm off on a Mediterranean cruise from October 21 to November 5 (or thereabouts, you know how you need to recuperate after a strenuous holiday).
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
I've put in a new server. The previous "Current server", will be "Older Server number 10", and the new server will run from 16 October until, I'd guess, the end of December or thereabouts.
At the current rate of newsthumbs flow, a server fills up in 2 1/2 or 3 months, and I have to do this swaparound thing. So, if you suddenly find that you can't access the newsthumbs of a few days ago, go here to the Newsthumbs Magic Carpet and click on the server you need to access.
Kasie Cavanaugh's Muscle Enforcer II
Fluff is acting a bit umpty. Not a big problem. But that's the problem with hardware, it doesn't work for ever. Next time I visit Watford, Fluff is coming home for an overhaul.
Several of the servers were having trouble contacting their router - if they can't reach the router, then they can't reach the internet. The symptom I was getting was, my monitoring program was finding it couldn't ping the router, so it restarted the network software. And this was happening quite a lot, on a few different computers.
I finally realised that all these computers were on the same hub, an old 10 mbit Netgear, the first hub I ever bought. I swapped it for a more modern 10/100 mbit switch (a switch is a hub on steroids) and the problem cleared.
I bought my first copy of Windows XP, and I was pleasantly surprised at the fact that it was almost as easy to install as Linux, a very great change from the Windowses I've been used to (98 and NT 4). I'm not sure what I'll be using it for, but my Windows have been standardised on Win 98 for so long now (since 1998, actually) it's probably time I upgraded. I'm just hoping that the various special devices and stuff I have, will work with XP, because they didn't come with XP drivers. So my shift to XP will probably be gradual.
I decided to try to use the XP box for the Ultrium tape backup. On the NT 4 box, I get about 5 gb/hour, so each 100gb tape takes about a day, and the terabyte newsthumbs servers take a week or 10 days to do a backup. But on the XP box, I was getting 1 gb/hour or less, which means the same servers would have taken over a month. Why is this? I don't know. I'm using the backup programs that come with NT and XP. But it means I can't use XP for that role - it's back to NT.
About five years ago, I changed from using a second hand ordinary quality server based in Maryland, to a colocation in New York, with my own brand spanking new server. This was Joan, a large, fast server bought from VA Research (they specialised in Linux servers). They loaded it up for me, I got someone to take it to NYC, it was installed, and it ran fine for years, carrying the whole of the web site except the Newsthumbs.
Then, in the first half of 2001, I had to make a relocation decision; my ISP was going out of business. I looked at all the options I could find, and I finally decided to locate in the UK; it was cheaper and (for me) massively more convenient than the various US options. It seems that I need to visit the site three or four times per year, and obviously the 10 mile trip to Watford is a lot easier than a tranatlantic haul, especially as I'm usually carrying half a dozen computers.
In the first few days of September, I installed my servers in Watford, but Joan was still carrying the load, because I wanted everything tested thoroughly before I switched over to actually using Watford for the live service.
Well, you know what happened on September 11. One of the less important effects of that event, was that electricity to my colocation in NYC was cut, and they switched to their diesel generators. And, a few days after that, the colocation at NYC went dark, because they ran out of diesel, and couldn't get a new delivery. So I switched the load to my servers in Watford.
If the economics had been different, I might have decided to have all my servers in New York; if I had, then I might have actually been in that city on September 11, installing my servers into a rack there. And my site would have been down for however long it took till the colo got working again. Luckily for me, I didn't locate in NYC.
Since then, Joan has been unemployed, just sitting there, drives spinning, no-one accessing the server. I've been trying to get her sent back to England, because there's always a use for another server. And today, I finally got her back.
She's big, and handsome. She's only a 333 MHz Pentium; back then, that was top of the line, but now it's ho-hum. She's got five 18gb SCSI drives; then, that was the best possible, but now I wouldn't buy a drive as small as 90gb. The next drive I buy will be 300gb.
I'm not sure what I'll be putting her to do just yet, but it's nice that after all these years, I finally got to see the computer that was the main web site server for so long.
So, I plugged Joan in, and .... BANG!!! Plus a smell of burning. Damn, I forgot to switch the power supply from 115 volts to 240. And it took out my entire electricity system. So, I took a deep breath, swore a terrible oath, and reset the circuit breaker, which at least got my electricy back on. Then I took Joan's power supply apart, and found a blown fuse. Replaced the fuse, powered up ... and it worked! Thank heaven for design engineers that realise there's idiots like me around.
Once I got past that hurdle, Joan worked fine. Red Hat version 5.1, pretty ancient. And there's a card inside which is a watchdog timer. I don't have documentation for it, but the idea is, if the computer hangs, then the watchdog reboots it. I don't have one of those on any of the other computers, and in my experience, it probably isn't worth having anyway, because Linux doesn't hang or crash (unless the CPU overheats, but then it's a hardware problem, of course, and rebooting probably won't help). There's something in there that makes a terrible whining noise, which means that Joan will have to live in the Valkyrie Data Shed (which, by the way, is working perfectly now).
There's people who call you up, unasked, and try to sell you things. That's not what they tell you initially, they have some script that gradually introduces their product or service. The idea is that you won't just hang up on them, you'll at least listen to their spiel.
And if you do hang up on them after the first two seconds, maybe you just hung up on some perfectly genuine person who was just rambling a bit. Or maybe you just don't like being rude, even to scum who interrupt your dinner to sell you double glazing.
I've found a solution that seems to work pretty well. I interrupt them after two seconds, and say "I don't own a house, I only rent."
If this is some sort of genuine call, it won't have any effect. And it isn't a very rude thing to say. But if it's another of those pesky double-glazing cold-callers, it has an instant and dramatic effect.
They hang up on me.
Nothing new
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!
Never wax again
At last, a spam to tell me how I can *avoid* body part enlargement. Maybe
I'll actually read this one? No, it'll spoil the illusion.
Provide china ball valve
BRIEF INTRODUCTION Our company
specially produces tub pieces,Now there are excellent technicians.We absorb
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and external good hand to perfect our products and meet requirements of our
customers.
Good material, reasonable designing and perfect standards throughout our
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are business relationships over ten countries and districts with us. Our
products are
acceptable in quality and reliability . We meet the demands of our home and
abroad customers
for rich force and reliable service, and advanced handling and escellent
quality. Welcome
domestic and overseas clients. We hope to create glorious 21 century hand by
hand.
So, if I ever want an escellent quality china ball valve, I know where to go.
We've sponsored lots of the women; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan, Steph Parks.
We're also sponsoring individual events such as the Femsport Valkyrie Festival, and the New York Muscle Club, 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. Anita Ramsey and Rhonda Dethlefs coming up.
You'll have noticed that I've been involved in putting up loads of other web sites (if you didn't notice, then I wasn't shouting loud enough). This has now become such a common ocurrence, I think I'll cover it in this newsletter.
The adventures of Sandi Stone, as documented by David Sullivan, have been a feature of this web site since it started seven years ago. Now, David has got together with the artist Yatz, to create three new stories, which are magnificently illustrated with Yatz's great artwork. These are available on the new Sandi Stone web site at $8 per story.
Even better news - the web site was so successful so fast, it's going to be a racing certainty that David will write more stories, illustrated by Yatz (or maybe someone else). And with the success of this web site, I'll try to persuade other authors to do a similar thing.
New feature. There's been talk about the idea that you can read sentences fairly easily provided the first and last letter of each word is intact; the other letters can be scrambled. So, I've got a new feature in the chatroom. /mix on and /mix off to use it. There's also /drunk on and /drunk off, and /cockney on, /yiddish on and /strine on. A Chatroom of Babel!
Member | Posts |
| albogrease | 2608 |
| jcc115 | 2276 |
| Micha | 2091 |
| tre1313 | 1910 |
| TomNine | 1666 |
| tkokidd0 | 1582 |
| drop112 | 1531 |
| bro5252 | 1471 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 1346 |
| gman292 | 1207 |
| mit19237 | 1108 |
| 64mikayla | 1017 |
| gaily304 | 1010 |
| hiram2000 | 966 |
| ginny2442 | 900 |
| boomerflex | 791 |
| boomer444 | 663 |
| rainer0000 | 600 |
| pamela69 | 600 |
| shad349 | 535 |
Albo made it to Numero Uno!
This month (up to October 20) we had 2130 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Sports is top, politics is number two. What is this web site all about, please remind me? | And it's Tre yet again! |
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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| The usual boards are in top place | The Grinch got the stats. |
Laugh-of-the-month was the look on my face when Joan exploded.
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of October 2003, there were about 664,000 pictures (40 gigabytes), 127 gigabytes of video, 7600 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 161 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 0.6 million pictures; there's about 60 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs.