Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - September 2005
A hard man is good to beat
Time for the Valkyrie to take a holiday. This year, I'm taking two weeks. The first week is a cruise to Scandinavia; that will happen at the end of August, and I get back a couple of days into September.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
A couple of drives look like they're going bad. This is a routine thing now. In a server farm with several hundred drives (currently, 87 terabytes), all of them cheap (mostly Maxtor), some of them quite elderly, I expect a steady trickle of drives going bad. My strategy for dealing with it, is as follows.
First, all the servers do a self-test, and email me when they fail. Even if they fail so badly that they can't email, I find out about it, because one server goes round checking all the others, once per minute, and that one emails me if it sees a problem. And if that one server fails, I know about it very soon, because I use it all the time - I'd know if it died!
One of the self tests, is to analyse the system log, looking for reports of hard drive problems. I expect you can do the same thing somehow in Windows, but in Linux, there's a file called "messages" which is all the messages from the operating system. I look for things like "dma_intr: BadCRC". If there's one or two per week, I treat that as something I'm willing to put up with. If there's a few hundred, then I take it as meaning that there's a real problem with the drive, and I should treat it as if it were about to fail.
I take that server down, and remove the failing drive, replace it with a brand new drive. But that means I've lost all the data. So then I reload it, because each server has a backup (and servers with a lot of data, a terabyte or more, have two backups, plus the backup on tape).
Each spring, I do a spring-clean. That meppintoppp@hotmail.comans I do a file system check on all the servers. If that reveals a bunch of problems, then that server comes out of service, and I check all the drives to see which one needs to be replaced.
Right now, I'm using drives that go from new to 10 years old.
The two servers that just had problems are basim and rosie. Basim had a failing 120 and a failing 80, which I replaced with two recycled 80s. Rosie had three failing 80s, which I replaced with two 120s. Those 80s are getting rather old; they go back 6 or 7 years now. You can't buy 80s any more; the smallest drives I buy now are 120s, which I get for £40. Even the 300gb drives are only £77 now! 400gb drives cost twice as much - that's why I'm not buying them yet.
I used to give failed drives a low level format and, if that worked, I'd re-use them. I've stopped doing that, because I'm thinking it's not an economy. When the failing drive is less than 120gb (which, currently, is the usual situation, because those are the oldest drives) then a replacement is £40. But if I recycle that drive and it fails again, then it'll probably chew up an hour or more of my time in replacing and reloading the data. Time is money. Time spent messing around with hardware is time not spent doing more useful stuff.
Maxtor are great about replacing failed drives. I run their diagnostic, get the error code, fill in a simple form on their web site, and I can send the drive off for replacement. For a year or so, they only offered a 1 year warranty, which was poor. But now they offer a three year warranty, even for their cheap 120 gb drives, which makes me happy. The drives which are out of warranty are filling up a large cardboard box. Maybe I should sell them on Ebay "Failed hard disks, non-working, make me a bid". Maybe I can sell the failed motherboards at the same time? One of the lessons from Ebay is that no matter what you have, someone, somewhere, wants it.
While I was in the Data Shed, I heard a "tick tick tick" sound, and followed it to Lydia. That's the sound that a drive makes when it recalibrates, and it means that the drive is having problems. So I've set up a replacement for Lydia, copied the data on to it, and I'll check out Lydia later.
Four servers are about to reach 2 years non-stop running.
Well done those!
In the Kasie Cavanaugh shop - "Naughty Little Girlscouts", a tickling fetish video.
Nothing new.
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.
No-one likes spam, but murdering a spammer is going too far.
Stun her with a Rolex!
The seven pound hammer works better.
Do you want to see real amateurs who have webcams
on their computers in their dorm rooms? This is
not one of those sites with professional girls who
get paid to do this in front of the camera, these
are the average girls next door, at college, trying
to make money and meet guys!
Let's see if I have this straight. These aren't girls who are paid to do it, these
are girls trying to make money.
Bill Gates got one
Well, good for Bill.
Most of the sponsorships now are by giving women server space and bandwidth, so they can operate their web sites without having to pay these fees. There's also photoshoots, which gets some revenue into their hands, as well as the traditional direct-funding sponsorship.
I've agreed to be the major sponsor of the Valkyrie Festival in Vancouver, in September this year.
Here's the full list of DtV family web sites
You can give a Diana the Valkyrie membership as a gift.
Sign up here for the gift that lasts and lasts
Member | Posts |
| TomNine | 1817 |
| madman3579 | 1768 |
| boomerflex | 1668 |
| buffy18976 | 1274 |
| gaily304 | 857 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 851 |
| bro007 | 825 |
| hiram2000 | 803 |
| Brian1958 | 644 |
| jcc115 | 471 |
| shad349 | 463 |
| GrappleJack | 462 |
| Jerroll | 416 |
| mrdiana615 | 391 |
| mit19237 | 391 |
| rainer0000 | 369 |
| thegoat77 | 362 |
| 1973manc | 333 |
| ginny2442 | 217 |
| drop112 | 213 |
Tom Nine and Madman are the Main Men.
2671 posts this month.
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| Sport and politics | Zig and Steve |
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.
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| It's all about FBBs, movies and mixed action. | The Grinch got the stats! |
Mr Dick Head has his own cash card
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of August 2005, there were about 776,000 pictures (52 gigabytes), 164 gigabytes of video, 9600 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 217 gigabytes. There's over 140 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs.