Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - January 2004

A hard man is good to beat

December, 2003

December brings Christmas, of course. Plus cold weather, short days and cold nights. I put a new telescope on my Christmas list; this one will be remotely controllable. You can expect lots more astronomy on this site in 2004, provided we get clear skies.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

Nothing new

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Newsthumbs

A new record - on December 20, total pictures that day was 188324 in 18383 megabytes

On December 29, I changed to a new news server; the last one filled up in just over 2 months.

Shopping Mall

The Tempting Temp, in Casie Kavanaugh's shop.

The Server Farm

Monday December 1. New month. New day. I wake up, check the servers, and notice that A) everything is stone dead, B) except the server monitor, which is screaming fit to bust.

"Oh no," I think, "that switch has blown up another power supply (see last month's Newslatter), and now I don't have a spare". But it wasn't the switch. Oh no. It was the firewall. Aaarghhh!

The firewall at Watford is a Cisco Pix. I got it because I reckoned I wanted somethng serious to fend off the bad folks. That Pix is $4000 worth of firewall. Actually, when I opened it up, it was $400 worth of computer, plus the Cisco software. But still. It's been working great for two years. And now ...

So I power-cycled it. And lo! It worked again. Hurrah.

But I treat that as a warning. Why did it crash? I don't know. Maybe it's just feeling it's age. So, I started thinking about Plan B; what do I do if it keels over again and doesn't come back? Or if it keeps keeling over every few days? I'll need to replace it, and fast. Everything goes via the firewall, no firewall = no web site. Oh, I suppose I could run without a firewall, but that's a bit like running naked down Oxford Street. You'll get away with it for a while, but sooner or later, you're going to get stopped.

On the other hand, I don't much fancy forking out $4000 for a piece of equipment that I suspect won't get used. So what are the alternatives?

I could build my own. I built the one I use here, and it works great. But there's a world of difference between building one for use here, and building one for use remotely.

A firewall is just a computer with a bit of memory and a bit of storage. It doesn't really need much. But the storage is a major weakness; if I use a hard disk, experience tells me that the hard disk will be the weak link. I'd say that if a hard disk lasts five years, that's about average. And there's a real chance of it stopping within a year, because it's a mechanical thing, spinning on bearings. Another weak link is the CPU fan. I'd say those last several years, but again, it's a mechanical thing, spinning on bearings. I really want no moving parts in the firewall, because it is such a critical item.

So I checked around, and this time, I have a much better idea of what I really need in a firewall. And I don't need a Cisco Pix 515, it's overkill for me. It allows 188 mbits of throughput, and 130,000 simultaneous connections. But I only have 100 mbits of bandwidth, and if I get 1000 connections at once it's a lot. The Pix 506E will do 100 mbits and 25,000 connections, so it's quite enough, and they're only about $800, which means that I feel a lot better about buying it, configuring it, and then putting it away as a reserve, so that if the firewall goes bad, I can rush down to Watford, and within an hour, have a replacement in place.

December 7. The firewall crashes again. OK, that's it. Two strikes, you're out. In goes the Pix 506E. I'll leave the old Pix 515 in place as an emergency spare, in case the 506E stops working, but if the 506E is satisfactory in action, I'll buy another one as a backup.

December 12. I went to Watford, and replaced the firewall. I decided to take the 515 away, maybe there's a broken fan or something that I can fix. But when I looked inside, I couldn't see anything wrong, and when I tested the memory, it worked fine. So, I have a Cisco Pix 515 which crashes once per week; that's very nearly useless, unless I can work out why it's crashing, and fix it. But since I can get a replacement 506E for about $800, it isn't worth while putting a lot of time and money into trying to fix it. Especially because I'm not sure how I can test it afterwards except by trying to use it.

Installing the 506 was easy, although I didn't realise it. I saved the configuration of the 515 to a file, and then used that for the 506. That worked fine ... except ... half a dozen of the computers inside the firewall, didn't talk to the outside.

So I spent the next four hours battering my head against that problem. Eventually, I gave up; hungry, tired and fed up. But when I got home, those computers were working, except one, which turned out to have hung, and a reboot fixed it. Go figure. I still haven't worked out why they were so stubborn.

Then, a few hours later, the main Newsthumbs server stopped responding. I tried a power cycle, and nothing helped. So I called for the "hands and eyes" service, and the first thing I got him to check was that it had power. It didn't. It turned out that the power cable had fallen out of the socket. That's what happens when you mess around with computers, there's always a chance of disturbing something. Once it was plugged back it, it worked fine.

I've started buying Maxtor 300 gb drives. And the experience hasn't been good so far; out of seven drives received, four were faulty. Two of them had obvious physical damage to the drive case.

Understanding the real world - saying thank you

Cameras

While I was at Watford, I took a couple of pictures of my cabinet, full of computers. The people there were a bit miffed, and explained that photography wasn't allowed. So I drew their attention to the notice, which said "No unauthorised photography", and I explained that it was my cabinet, containing my computers, and I'd authorised the photography, so it wasn't unauthorised. They didn't have any answer to that.

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!

Get the Vibrating Duck 

I'm almost tempted to follow the link to find out what this is about ... but not quite ...

how are things?
When Banks companys compair, guess who wins?
How does Sildenafil Citrate Help

OK, you got me. I have no idea.

I don't know why I bother working anymore

Yeah, I have days like that too.

 get $231 for $100 free !

If it costs $100, it isn't free.

I know you won't believe me when I tell you this...

You got that right.

IMPORTANT INFO ABOUT YOUR COLON

And what about my semicolon?

Your Colon Health

Actually, I hardly ever use colons. I'm more a semicolon sort of person.

Cleaner Colon

Why this obession with punctuation?

I healed ToeNai1-Fungus quick with FungMD

Let me guess - you did a laying on of toes?

My antenna on cellphone wont work....

You need one of my three feet long 8-element yagi antennas

Hi there my love desirable ally!
I guess I have great hearsay and nice inform for you nowadays!

Glad to hear it.

How do you do!
I'm from Gary Litiches - your brilliant assistant and mate!
Trust pleasant propose for you in the present day dear Valkyrie!
Verify this ulr right away for your plus!

Uh ... yes ...

His and Her Self Stirring Mugs

At last, liberation from the grinding labour of stirring your own mug.

Virus of the month

I quite like the one that comes with what sounds like a personal letter, telling me that they checked my computer and it has a virus, and here's an antivirus to get rid of it. I'd guess that will fool quite a few people.

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

A new feature for the New Year! If you do /picture then Clepsy will choose a picture from the site and put up a link to it. I'm hoping that this will lead to people discovering new parts of the site they haven't found before.

Chatter of the month

We have a new start - Madman!

On the Message Boards

This month we had 2988 posts to the boards.

Back Page

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW, is now a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Well done, Sir Tim. Now all we have to do is clean up the Royal Internet.

And Happy New Year to everyone!

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

At the end of December 2003, there were about 673,000 pictures (41 gigabytes), 128 gigabytes of video, 7800 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 170 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 1/2 million pictures; there's about 69 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs.

To the Magic Carpet