Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - November 2005
A hard man is good to beat
The leaves are starting to fall, and we put the clocks back, but it's still remarkably warm outside, especially when it's sunny.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
Working normally. I filled up another "older server", although this isn't notiable to users. Now there are 18 servers full of older newsthumbs, at roughly a terabyte each.
Problems while at sea.
Usually, when I go on a week's cruise, everything works OK in my absence, and I can even keep up with my email via the mobile phone/GPRS/8-element Yagi antenna. But this time, three major problems hit while I was at sea. And one minor, but extremely annoying problem.
Let's start off with the annoying minor problem. At the start of the cruise, I visited the ship's library, and found a Lindsey Davis mystery I hadn't read. It was, as usual, a good read, but when I got to the end, the denoument, the finale ... the last few pages were missing. It was just like "Lady don't fall backwards"!
Now on to the more important failures.
The first, was a partial failure of the Herbiceps password file. I have things set up so that if the whole file gets deleted, it will be automatically recreated. Indeed, if the password file is, for some reason, 10% smaller than it was previously, my thing assumes that something bad happened, so it recreates the file. But what happened this time, was that the password file lost just 6% of its contents.
That meant that a whole bunch of people couldn't get access, and the first I heard of this, was emails arriving complaining about lack of access. Investigation revealed the problem; the file had sudenly gotten about 6% smaller. I know this, because that file is copied once per hour, and I can look at all the old copies.
Once diagnosed, it wasn't a big problem. I just recreated the whole herbiceps file from the membership database, uploaded that, and the problem was fixed. It was nice to be able to do that while on a ship.
The second problem was with the Newsthumbs. I was looking at the Newsthumbs server, and the backup server, and in the middle of doing that, the backup stopped responding. That's not a really big problem, because members don't see the backup, unless the main server goes down. But I don't like running without a backup!
The third problem was the worst. I was in the middle of doing some stuff, when suddenly I couldn't access any of the servers at Watford! Panic! My first thought was that there's a temporary communications problem, but I could access my firewall there, so it wasn't comms. My second thought was that my firewall has done something horrible and isn't letting anything through. So I logged into the firewall and checked it out. The firewall seemed to be acting fine, but I reset it anyway. No effect.
So, what else could go down, that would take out all the servers? I knew that everything leading up to the firewall was OK, and the only thing between the firewall and all the other servers, is a big 32-way switch. A switch is something that takes packets from one source (in this case the firewall) and feeds them to umpteen (in this case, 31) different servers. So, I used my remote power cycler to power the switch off and on again, and Hey! The servers all came alive! Which pretty much proved that it was the switch.
Everything worked for a little while, then it didn't. I power cycled the switch, and everything came alive. Oh rats, I thought, what do I do?
And at that point, the ship sailed out of port, my mobile signal got too weak, and I couldn't access the internet.
So, I spent the next few hours thinking about all the possible ways to deal with this, and hoping that the switch wouldn't fall over while I wasn't watching it. Which, of course, it did.
Then I went to the ship's computer center; for about 50 cents per minute, you can access the internet, but all you get is web access. I tried to check www.thevalkyrie.com, but I got nothing. Ditto a few other sites I host. So, I accessed my remote power cycler (which, as you've probably realised by now, isn't on that switch), cycled the power to the switch, and then I could access www.thevalkyrie.com. Sort of. It was blocked, the ship's computer center has parental control blocks in place. Fortunately, it was pretty weak control; I soon found that if I used the IP address instead of www.thevalkyrie.com, I could get access. So, I checked a few other sites, and everything was working.
But this wasn't really a good answer; I didn't fancy having to reboot the switch every so often while cruising around the Iberian Peninsula. So I thought some more.
The thing is, a switch has no moving parts. When a server fails, it's either the CPU fan, or a hard drive, both of which have moving parts. Switches just don't fail. Except this one had.
Fortunately, I'm a suspenders and two belts sort of person. I've seen too many things fail that "couldn't possibly fail". So, sitting in the cabinet that houses my servers, I have a spare 16-way switch. I worked out which servers I could do without for now (for example, there's five that have failed since I last did a server install four months ago), and made a list of "got to have" servers. Then I called up the folks at Watford, and asked for a "hands and eyes" service. That's the arrangement whereby you can talk someone through doing some stuff for you.
I explained the problem in outline, and then I gave a detailed list of which cables to move, from where and to where. I was on my mobile to the folks at Watford, calling from Lisbon, and using the ship's computer service to check what they were doing. I thought at the time that there was quite a good chance that either I'd get something badly wrong, or the person plugging cables would. But no! He did exactly what I talked him though doing, and got it 100% right, and so several hours after the switch went down, I had a working replacement up and running.
Of course, this wasn't a long term solution - as soon as I got back to England, I made a fast trip to Watford to replace the 32-way switch and take the 16-way out of action. At the same time, I replaced all the servers that have failed over the last four months, and I left the 16-way switch in place, for use in an emergency.
I replaced the dead switch with a working one, and replaced six servers. I ordered a new switch to replace the dead one, and a bunch of 300 gb drives to replace the dead ones. 300 gb drives are now a mere £66, that's about $120. They're a lot cheaper, per gigabyte, than the 400s or the 500s. And cheaper per gb than pretty much any of the smaller drives. I'm thinking, it's unlikely I'll be buying anything smaller from now on.
There's now a free version; the main difference is that the video size is very small.
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.
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.
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. Perfect for a Christmas gift!
The big news here is the return of mrk alias 1973manc. There's also a resurgence of Jabber.
Member | Posts |
| TomNine | 2178 |
| boomerflex | 2056 |
| hiram2000 | 1746 |
| Jabber | 1717 |
| 1973manc | 1600 |
| buffy18976 | 1542 |
| Jerroll | 968 |
| madman3579 | 801 |
| mit19237 | 694 |
| sonia1 | 622 |
| bro007 | 588 |
| rainer0000 | 556 |
| gaily304 | 527 |
| GrappleJack | 521 |
| zig563 | 480 |
| lpdorman69 | 468 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 460 |
| drop112 | 428 |
| shad349 | 397 |
| Brian1958 | 319 |
Tom Nine and Boomer again.
There's been a major discussion on my board, about the message board software. Once again, we're talking about the idea of changing to a different software package, possibly to YaBB (that's the package I put on Herbiceps and other sites). But I've also been changing the existing software to accomodate many of the things that people say they want.
Look here to see a new style of board, with threads, and multiple posts on the same page, and the ability to handle as many inline links as you want to have. The old style of viewing the boards will still be available when that version of the software starts to be used.
2328 posts this month.
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| Sport and politics. Sometimes I wonder if I'm running the wrong sort of web site. | Steve and Zig again |
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. |
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of October 2005, there were about 875,000 pictures (66 gigabytes), 169 gigabytes of video, 9800 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 236 gigabytes. There's about 160 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.