Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - February 2004
A hard man is good to beat
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
No problems.
It was a very quiet month, down on the farm. It was very windy on January 31, and as a result we had a minor power outage. But the UPSes and the generator between them meant that there was no impact on the computers.
Your computer wants to contact www.thevalkyrie.com; to do that, it needs to know the IP address, which is something that looks like 121.34.56.141. For www.thevalkyrie.com it is actually 62.25.96.136 - but your computer doesn't know that yet. Or maybe it does - if it contacted www.thevalkyrie.com a few minutes ago, then it will remember the IP address from the previous contact.
By the way, maybe you're wondering what IP and DNS stand for? It really doesn't matter, but since you ask, it's "Internet Protocol" and "Domain Name Service". See, I told you it doesn't matter. The IP address is like a phone number for computers. You can remember apple.com, but normal people won't be able to remember 17.254.3.183. And a DNS server is like a phone book for looking up a name, and getting a number.
But let's suppose it doesn't know the IP address for www.thevalkyrie.com.
Wait - maybe you thought www.thevalkyrie.com is a web site? No - it's a computer. That computer's real name is norah.thevalkyrie.com (but it'll answer to www.thevalkyrie.com), and it's address is 62.25.96.136
So, your computer goes to the DNS server that it knows about, which would usually be run by your ISP, and asks it if it knows the IP address. Because that's the job that DNS servers do. If it does know, then that's fine. If it doesn't, then the ISP's DNS server, asks the "root server", which is a holy computer kept in a sacred temple someplace. Actually, there's dozens of them located all over the world; the whole internet doesn't depend on just computer, no matter how holy it is!
The holy root server doesn't know the IP address for www.thevalkyrie.com, but it knows something even better. It knows the address for the computer that knows all the addresses that end with thevalkyrie.com. That computer is my name server, and it's name is ianth.thevalkyrie.com (I also call it ns1.thevalkyrie.com, that's an alias).
On that computer, I maintain a table of all the computers that end with thevalkyrie.com, so it knows the IP address of vnews.thevalkyrie.com, of vtv01.thevalkyrie.com and dozens of others. As you can imagine, if that computer went down, no-one could find any of my computers! So, there's two backups for it, running at a different site, and the root computer knows about those. Ianth did go down, several months ago. It was a severe hardware problem, and eventually I had to replace the entire computer. But because I do DNS (domain name services) on alternative computers, that didn't put my whole web site out of action.
So, the ISP's DNS server gets told by the root computer, "I don't know about www.thevalkyrie.com, but I know a computer who does know - ask ianth.thevalkyrie.com which is at 62.25.96.133
The ISP's DNS server asks ianth "where is www in your domain thevalkyrie.com?" and it gets told "It's at 62.25.96.136". So the ISP's computer tells your computer, and your computer can now ask my computer to send it files.
If another computer asks your ISP's computer the same question, it can answer without having to consult the root, because it remembers the answers for a while, so it doesn't have to keep asking the same questions.
So how does all that information get into those servers?
When you register a domain name, your registrar takes your money, and sends the registration information to the root server. That consists of who owns the domain name, and the name servers for that domain. The root server charges $6 per year to your registrar for doing the service; your registrar charges anything from $7 to $35 to you. If you pay $35, you're paying well over the odds, and getting nothing special back. It's a good idea to choose a registrar that has been around for a couple of years (you don't want one that goes out of business), who displays a degree of technical competence, and who makes the process of registration easy. There's a lot of good registrars around.
If you change the computer that's hosting your web site, then you need to change the information on your name server. For example, if I have a hardware problem with 62.25.96.136, I can tell ianth to direct everyone who wants www.thevalkyrie.com, to use 62.25.98.247. I keep a copy of all the data there, so you won't notice that I have a problem.
Actually, you might. If your ISP already knows that www.thevalkyrie.com is 62.25.96.136, then it will take a while before it asks my nameserver again, and finds out that it's now 62.25.98.247. That can be anything from a few minutes, upwards.
But if I can plan for a change, then there really is zero impact of surfers. For example, on January 27, I changed the server that runs vnews14.thevalkyrie.com. This is a minor housekeeping issue for me, and you won't have noticed any effect, even if you were in the middle of using that server, because I kept the old server running for a long time afterwards.
For most people, all this DNS stuff is done for them, and they don't need to worry about it. But it helps to know how it all works, so that when things don't work right, you can figure out where the problem is. And although people make a big fuss about how complicated it all is, actually it isn't. What it is, is difficult to find anyone who can explain it in plain words.
So how come I do all this stuff myself, instead of leaving it to some ISP somewhere? When I started this web site, that's exactly what I did. But when my ISP decided to go out of business, I decided to do all this for myself, because that way, if I need a change, I can make a change immediately, and I don't have to badger some third party to do it, and wait days until it's done.
Plus, I no longer have an ISP. I'm the ISP now; that happened in 2001. I buy electricity, computers and packet transit, and do all the service myself. When you run one of the biggest sites on the internet (100 computers, 60 million pictures) it makes sense to buy wholesale, not retail.
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!
After due deliberation with my Uncle , I have decided to forward to you this
business proposal.
And I've decided not to take you up on it.
Elk extract that gives you multiple 0rgasms.
Elk extract? Whatever next.
I'm glad to tell you that they finally decided to make it much
more easier for those who really need various medeecashion.
That's great. Now all I need is someone to tell me what the Sam Hill is "medeecashion".
STILL NO LUCK ENRGAILNG IT?
Our 2 pcodruts will work for you!
Is one of those products a spell checker?
order confirmation. your order should be shipped by January, via fedex.
your federal express tracking number is %RANDOM_WORD.
thank you for registering. your userid is: %RANDOM_WORD
Oops.
Good day Valkyrie!
I'm firmly convince you know Tomas Dilmah? Expect he fatefully has solid
setbacks!
Prove this page to help him!
Is it just me, or is spam getting a lot weirder?
I like this one because the message it comes with is so good. Pity is isn't in good English, but apart from that, there's a big incentive to click on the attachment.
I don't know which virus it is. I don't think giving it a name really makes any difference.
I said, I love you..,, and you said NOTHING
And now,,, Go Away From Me
Here are my love-letter((s)) mock me mock me again and again .
Enjoy it. blablabla GO!
Here's another good come-on. Oh my god, the FBI have confiscated my computer contents!
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Downloading of Movies, MP3s and Software is illegal and punishable by law.
We hereby inform you that your computer was scanned under the IP 62.127.126.44
. The
contents of your computer were confiscated as an evidence, and you will be
indicated.
You get the charge in writing, in the next days.
In the Reference code: #7029, are all files, that we found on your computer.
The sender address of this mail was masked, to protect us against mail bombs.
- You get more detailed information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
-FBI-
- Department for "Illegal Internet Downloads", Room 7350
- 935 Pennsylvania Avenue
- Washington, DC 20535, USA
- (202) 324-3000
And another one with a convincing cover email. Who's been billing my card?
Thanks for your registration.
( We say Sorry again, the first mail was delivered to an unknown mail address.
This was a bug in our mailing system! )
The amount of 239.- USD was deducted by your credit card.
Welcome,
you can now visit more than 1200 very very hot web pages!
Your registration, pages and passwords are in the attachment.
enjoy
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 latest is Zoa Linsey
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.
Member | Posts |
| madman3579 | 7177 |
| buffy18976 | 3905 |
| boomerflex | 3260 |
| TomNine | 2812 |
| Jabber | 2801 |
| hiram2000 | 2639 |
| jcc115 | 2606 |
| tkokidd0 | 2463 |
| thegoat77 | 2434 |
| 1973manc | 2147 |
| mit19237 | 1492 |
| Mujamba | 1383 |
| gaily304 | 1322 |
| shad349 | 1267 |
| gman292 | 1265 |
| rainer0000 | 1206 |
| ginny2442 | 1153 |
| bro5252 | 1034 |
| zig563 | 779 |
| tex666 | 735 |
And Madman soars far into the lead.
This month we had 3366 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Some excellent discussions on the Politics board, also on the FBB board. | Tre is back in the lead, but maxt and boomer are treading on his tail. |
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 FBB board is most often checked by people | The Grinch got the stats. |
You'll never believe what's at the site Powergenitalia/
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of January 2004, there were about 677,000 pictures (42 gigabytes), 128 gigabytes of video, 8000 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 171 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 4 1/2 million pictures; there's about 73 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs.