Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - December 2003

A hard man is good to beat

November, 2003

The leaves turn yellow and gold, and start to fill up the fishpond. Night comes early now, and there's a chill in the air. But Christmas is just around the corner!

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

A surprising thing. On November 28, a Japanese translation of "Bonnie's Battered Boyfriend" was the top story download. Either people aren't looking at what they download before they click on things, or else there's a *lot* more Japanese people using this web site than I thought.

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

Nothing new

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Newsthumbs

The new newsserver is running fine. But we're seeing record levels of Newsthumbs. There's usually more than 100,000 pictures per day now, and on November 9, there were 170062 pictures in 18 gigabytes. At this rate, I'll be lucky if a server lasts two months.

Shopping Mall

Nothing new

The Server Farm

While I was on the cruise, I was able to use the GPRS-enabled mobile phone, via an 8-element yagi antenna and a photographic monopod as a mobile mast, to make contact with the internet (and therefore with my servers) pretty much the whole time. I could get connected at every port, and also as we were cruising throught the Straits of Gibraltar, while we were in the Atlantic near Spain, and in the Channel. My estimate is that I can get connectivity within about 20 miles of a mast, and there must be a mast in every significant town. One annoyance; I could get voice signal from Tunisia, but Vodafone don't have any GPRS partner there. I'd say I was in contact on about 3/4 of the days of the cruise.

There's internet availablility on the ship, but I didn't want to use it. For one thing, they think that "internet" means "web", and I want to be able to use telnet and ssh to log in to my servers. For another thing, they charge £15 ($25) per hour.

You might wonder why I'd want to work during a cruise. Well, it's like this. There's only me. You might imagine some huge Valkyrie-company full of Valkyrie-professionals who know what they're doing; actually, there's only one Valkyrie groping in the dark and trying not to make the same mistakes twice.

So, when Beryl went down, it only took me a few minutes to do a reboot and get it all working again. But if I hadn't, I'd have been getting a whole bunch of emails telling me about the problem for the next two weeks. I could spend one hour or less per day sorting out urgent problems like that, and it meant that the site was running pretty well while I was away.

Problems while I was on the cruise. Beryl (older newsthumbs) crashed as soon as we left Southhampton, and I had to do a reboot while I was in the English Channel (I can do remote reboots). On one of the nameservers, the name service kept crashing, and I had to restart it. And on the last day I was away, the server for Herbiceps developed a bad disk, and when I got back, I had to use a backup server for that.

Ongoing problems - my network backup server is giving "symptoms", and has been for some time. I can't fsck the drives, although they do seem to be working. But it makes me nervous, so I set up a new server for this, or to be more exact, three new servers (three generations of backup, called "grandmother, mother, daughter"). There's not much worse than having a server crash and then finding that your backups don't work.

I've put in Bethe, a substitute for Beryl and I also replaced the flaky nameserver. They were working, and are "good enough for government work", but that isn't good enough. I want all my servers to run without me having to baby them.

I made Barda to replace Beryl. Barda ran for a few days, and then Beryl crashed again, so I switched the load over to Barda. I really don't like computers that need constant attention.

So Barda ran for a few hours, and then crashed. Pah! So I built another computer, Bethe, using completely different hardware. So far, Bethe has been fine.

Replacing the name server was a straightforward swapout for a computer I already had running, but wasn't using.

I also reprogrammed the firewall. I get so many attacks, like thousands per hour. I'm sure everyone else does too. I log them, and they're displayed on the screen, scrolling. I noticed, before I went on vacation (I didn't want to monkey with the firewall just before I went away, the firewall is one thing that I can screw up really big if I make a mistake), that the firewall computer was making a lot of "kachunk" noises, that's the disk working. And the firewall logs are humungous. I never look at them, I bet no-one else looks at their logs either. But I noticed that a lot of the attacks were port 135, which is some dumb virus, I dunno which one. So, I told the firewall to stop logging those attacks, just block them. And now I don't get the "kachunk" noises. It's nice to have your own firewall, not some store-bought thing, you can make it do what you want.

Jayne is a computer I actually sit next to (most of my computers are in the Valkyrie Data Shed or at Watford). So when Jayne started making a grinding noise, I heard it loud and clear. I opened up the case, and I could see that the CPU fan wasn't running smoothly. I replaced it, and it was nice and quiet again.

When I opened up my nameserver (the ne that kept dropping the name service), I found that the CPU fan was running raggedly. That means that the CPU wasn't getting cooled properly, so maybe that was the cause of the problem. I'd say that any fan that's five years old is running on borrowed time, based on my experiences. I replaced that fan.

Zelia is the server for StoneColdMail. The drive that holds people's inboxes started to give problems. It would "drop out", become inaccessible. When I rebooted the server, it would work again. But after it did that the second time, I copied all the data to another server, replaced the drive, and copied the data back.

November 24, the entire site dropped off the net. I woke up that day to alarm bells ringing; the entire rack of equipment at Watford was off the air. Investigation revealed that the switch that accepts packets for the entire rack, had gone dark. Further investigation revealed that the culprit was the power supply, one of those little black boxes that plugs into the wall and gives you five volts DC. Fortunately (actually it wasn't good luck, it was good planning), I had a replacement sitting on the rack (I have a few spare parts there). So I got that replaced, and everything worked fine.

Actually, alarm bells don't ring. I have a monitoring system, which emails me. Most of the things it detects are non-critical, or temporary problems. I don't want to be woken at 5am for some hiccup.

All the above might look like a lot of failures, but in the context of about 100 computers, it's actually just a few minor problems. I just prefer to fix minor problems before they become major and urgent.

Understanding the real world - saying thank you

Every now and then, I get a pleasant surprise - someone in a company I deal with is actually helpful. And not just helpful, they actually go out of their way to help. What I like to do in that situation, is thank them.

My thanks has three components. First the words - that's easy. Then, second, I give them a small gift. Nothing embarrassing, I just give them a book that I've read and liked, usually a paperback, value of gift maybe $1. But the third, and most important component, is that I write a letter, addressed to the president of their company, explaining what has happened, and that Jane Doe has given exceptional customer service to me. I give her the letter to read, and ask her to get it to the president for me.

My intention here is to reward correct behaviour, in the hope that it leads to more correct behaviour.

Cameras

Some of you will already have noticed the Valkyrie Telescope. Most of the time it's not in use. Sometimes, during the day, I point it at a distant tree and you can watch the twigs. If there were any caterpillars on the tree, you'd be able to see the expressions on their faces. But when the sky at night is clear, I can point it at the moon, and you can see the lunar craters and mountains.

It's a four inch Newtonian Reflector, and I replaced the objective lens with a webcam. The main limitation in this system is the webcam. It's OK for the moon, but when I look at a star, all I get is a blob. I managed to find Vega one night, and put that on the webcam.

The overall problem, of course, is the weather. It's cloudy here a lot of the time. That's good, it means we don't get so frozen during winter nights and we don't get so hot during summer days. But it's no use for astronomy. And so far, I've had three clear nights out of a couple of dozen.

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!

Never wax again

I'm more used to all the diet spams telling me how I can wane.

Virus of the month

This one is reported in a rather good online news service called The Register. I've received at least one copy, so it's in circulation.

The email says it comes from Paypal (of course it doesn't, I've already explained how easy it is to put a fake return address on an email's envelope, it's about as easy as putting a fake return address on a paper envelope).

Of course, it takes a brave person to run an attachment to an email; I'm certainly not going to. But, I guess there's some folks around who would. And, of course, it asks you for your credit card details. Duh. I suppose anyone brave enough to run the thing, might also be brave enough to give their card details.

I'll say it again. Don't click on email attachments, even if they claim to come from someone you know and trust.

Sponsorships

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.

New web sites

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 Clubhouse

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

Alpha just squeaked past Tom and Tre.

On the Message Boards

This month (from October 21) we had 4080 posts to the boards.

Back Page

The cruise went well. Did you hear about the cruise where a third of the passengers came down with a nasty gastric complaint? Well, I wasn't on that one. But I might have been, it was a toss-up whether I'd be on that one, or the one I went on. I'm a lucky Valkyrie.

It's just as well I don't likve in LA. If I did, I'd have to start relabelling my hard disks. Master/slave is no longer a permissible term to describle the situation when you have two drives on one cable and one of the drives sets the data clocking for the other. I suppose we'll have to call them Dom/sub.

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

At the end of November 2003, there were about 670,000 pictures (41 gigabytes), 127 gigabytes of video, 7700 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 169 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 5 million pictures; there's about 66 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs.

To the Magic Carpet