Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - October 2004

A hard man is good to beat

September, 2004

Late summer, and the garden looks tidy, but I'm starting to see a few falling leaves.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

Thomas Whitfield (one of our authors) has a book for sale, look here

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

Nothing new

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Newsthumbs

Apart from a few minor problems that I needed to fix, the new system is working fine, both the Current Newsthumbs and the Older Newsthumbs. September 14th saw 208791 pictures in 20912 mb. On the 15th, 227620 pictures in 22168 mb, on the 16th 226483 pictures in 23549 mb.

Looking at these figures, I'd say it won't be long until we start seeing a quarter of a million per day.

The Server Farm

I've been trying to reduce the number of computers a bit, by making one server do more jobs than it was previously. One example was the Bionic Arm, which needed a USB port for the camera, a serial port for the power switch, and another serial port for the arm control. That meant using two computers.

I had a thought. So I bought a USB-to-serial converter, and it worked great! Now the Bionic Arm, the Valksignal, and the Power-off alarm are all controlled by one computer, which is also the computer I use for chatroom chatting.

Great News! BT used to say that if you were more than 4 km from the exchange, you couldn't have 1 mbit DSL, only 0.5 mbit. I'm at 4.25 km. But now they've decided that the limit is 6km. So, I ordered one. It seemed to work OK so I'll convert the other five lines from 0.5 to 1 mbit.

I've got a new server design now - a motherboard, a celeron, one memory stick (512mb) and three 300gb drives. I'm building a load of these to cater for all that newsthumb data.

Meanwhile, drives continue to die. I hate hardware that doesn't work. The main culprits here are the 160 gb drives that I was buying back when they were the latest greatest. There's far too many of these failing while still under guarantee. I mean, I don't expect a drive to last for ever, but I'm getting such a high percentage of them failing within three years. I suppose it must be a nightmare for Maxtor. I send each failed drive back to them for replacement. I'd guess they're only worth £50 each (I paid £200 for them), but it's worth getting them replaced.

I can only pray that the 300 gb drives don't go the same way - I'm buying a *lot* of those.

Western Digital's 200gb drive are horrible - at least, the ones I got are. They don't fail, they "drop out", and the hardware has to be power cycled.

Understanding the internet - damn you, Vodafone

When I go away for a few days, I want to stay in touch with my servers, and to do that, I have a mobile phone which does GPRS, and connects via Bluetooth to a laptop. Because I usually go away on a cruise, I also take an 8-element yagi antenna. Last cruise I went on, I could access my servers via the internet as we sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar, and much of the way along the North African coast.

So, I was getting ready to go away again for a week, and I thought it might be a good idea to test out my connection ... just in case. Just as well. Vodafone have come up with censorship. Sure, I can see the wisdom of not allowing children onto porn sites. But it wouldn't let me get onto the server I use for database stuff. I had to register on the Vodafone web site, pay some money, and then they unblocked it. I'd hate to have to do that while in the middle on the Med on a bad connection. Oh well, it works now.

... almost. While I was in Ireland, my Vodafone connection was blocked for web access. I could log in to the servers via ssh and telnet, but not over the web. I'll had a few words with Vodafone about this, but they have no idea what happened.

While I was on the ship, we had a gale, and power went out at the Valkyrie Data Shed.

It all started when on the English Channel between Amsterdam and Zeebrugge, the ship encountered a storm, winds of 60 mph, which I know is small potatoes compared with the Florida hurricanes, but is plenty enough when you're on a ship. The crew put out "Motion Discomfort" bags for the passenger to vomit into. Fortunately, I don't get seasick.

High winds weren't just in the Channel, of course, they were all over Southern England. And at some point, they blew over a tree which fell on some power lines (I'm guessing there) and Chesham lost power, for more than just several minutes.

But I have UPSes that cut in automatically and keep everything running, so that's not a problem. And I have a diesel generator that powers up after less than a minute, so that should keep things running for a really long time; like weeks. But ... as the electricity went out, it also threw a circuit breaker, so the Valkyrie Data Shed didn't get the benefit of the generator. This happened at about 3pm on the 21st.

20 or 30 minutes after that, the first UPS (I have several) ran out of battery, and the servers attached to it went dark. But by that time, the Chief Hamster had noticed that power was out, and reset the circuit breaker, so at that point, there was power to the Data Shed. And what should have happened then, was all the computers affected by the outage would start up, and apart from a few minutes, service would be restored.

But ... one of the switches (thats a box that connects the computers to the network and thence to the internet) didn't like what had just happened, and refused to transmit packets of data.

Connected to that switch, were the nameservers for the DtV family of web sites.

I logged in at about midnight to do a routine check that everything was OK, and to my horror, I found I couldn't contact several servers (including those nameservers). And, since it was midnight, I couldn't do much.

Next morning, I called the Chief Hamster on the phone, and got him to visit the Data Shed, and cycle the power on the recalcitrant switch (after I'd tried various other things first, because it wasn't immediately obvious that it was a problem with that switch). That was all it wanted, and it sprung into life; that must have been about 11am on the 22nd.

Lessons learned:

1. I need to separate the nameservers so they're on different switches (I have two nameservers, so if one is out of action, the other one does the job) ... done.

2. That switch will be replaced. It doesn't get another chance ... done.

Cameras

I've improved the deal that I offer to FBBs for making, hosting, billing and administering web sites for them. Before, they didn't have to pay for anything, and we divided the revenue. Now, I've included a digital camera in the deal, suitable for taking pictures at 2048 by 1536 resolution, which is about twice the resolution needed for a web site. I can do this because the cost of these cameras has fallen so much. It's another way I can help to sponsor the athletes.

I took one of them on the cruise with me. It's very nice to have a tiny camera like that, which you can carry anywhere and pull out at a moment's notice. Much better than having to lug a full size heavy camera around.

Spams of the Month

I don't make these up, although the comments on the spams are mine, of course. 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!

By the way, if you're using StoneColdMail (which is free to web site members) then you won't see most of these spams, they'll be delivered into your "Spam" folder.

you need this

I don't need that

Be prepared for the next power outage!

You mean apart from my eight UPSes and the diesel generator that fires up automatically?

Here you can buy stolen passports, counterfeit dollars and all other things you
are in want of. If you need, we would provide you with the info about the bank
account of a person who you are interested in. Also there are credit cards
dumps of US and Europe residents. 

Actually, I don't want a stolen passport or counterfeit dollars, and I suspect I won't want anything else you have either.

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. Also Anita Ramsey and Rhonda Dethlefs.

DtV Family web sites

A new site, Femuscle by Pellegrini Only three galleries there so far, but Pellegrini is working to expand it.

Also Fitshots, and also Asian Lifterettes - I have an arrangement with someone in the Phillipines.

The Clubhouse

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

Madman, the posting paragon, heads the list this month.

On the Message Boards

I've put up a new style of board; it includes threading, the possibility of moderation, and lots more. You can see what Tom Nine's Tussling Tenement looks like, we gave it a new coat of paint, and it looks great. Mixed wrestling sessions is a popular topic!

This month we had 3185 posts to the boards.

Back Page

I'll have to start wearing gloves while feeding the hamsters

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

At the end of September 2004, there were about 724,000 pictures (46 gigabytes), 153 gigabytes of video, 8600 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 200 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 8.3 million pictures; there's about 100 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs. How many web sites do you know that have 100 million pictures?

To the Magic Carpet