Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - March 2006
A hard man is good to beat
Brrr - a bit cold this month, and a couple of snow showers. But the snowdrops are flourishing, the crocuses have started, and the daffodils are budding. Spring is just around the corner!
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
No problems.
On February 1, I had a slight problem.
After the power glitch last month, I decided to replace one of the UPSes, because the old one was old, and they only last a few years. So I powered down the three servers that it protected, replaced the UPS, then powered them up again.
But the Secure Server didn't power up.
The secure server is really important - it has all the signups each day, as well as various other functions. I cycled the power a few times, but no joy. So I took it out of action.
Fortunately (well, it isn't luck, of course) I had a backup secure server, which sits there waiting to take over. I do a backup from the secure server to this backup, once per hour. So it looked like I hadn't lost much, maybe half an hour's signups.
Once I had the replacement server in place, I had a more careful look at the old secure server. The problem seemed to be the hard disk, so I booted the server up from a CD Rom, and I found I could mount the hard disk once the server was running. That meant I could copy the files from the old server, which meant I was able to recover the two signups that had happened after the last hourly backup.
So, I'm making a few changes. I've set up another backup secure server, of course, but this time, I'm doing a full backup once per hour, and a partial backup (of the signup data, for example) once per minute. There's other elements in the backup scheme that I use, but I didn't have the once per minute backup in place before. That should, I hope, mean that if the server goes down, I don't lose even the few signups that happened since the hourly backup.
You might remember that I decided to convert from my own homebrew firewall, to a shop-bought Pix, because with my homebrew, there were a number of elements that could fail (such as the power supply, the hard disk) that aren't there on the Pix.
The Pix arrived, and I connected to it and set up the access control rules. It wasn't too difficult, I just used what I'd already set up for my homebrew firewall. But I did make one big difference - I'm now using "non-routable" addresses. Non-routable addresses, such as 192.168.something.something are addresses that you can use on your own network internally, but which can't reach across the internet. The advantage of that is that I don't have to ask anyone about using them, and it gives me 65534 addresses I can use (which means I can have 65536 computers). Without that, I only have 256 IP addresses, and so I can only use 256 computers. That sounds like a lot, and it was a lot ten years ago when I started doing this, but now I have some 150 computers, and 256 isn't that far away - I'd guess that by five years from now, I'll have more than that.
And the Pix will translate the routable addresses that I have, to whichever non-routable address is relevant. That's fine, because the majority of the computers I have here, aren't intended to be accessed from outside - they're "Network Attachable Storage".
And then I procrastinated - the old firewall was actually working fine, and I knew that moving to the Pix was going to be really difficult. But eventually, I decided that I had to take the plunge.
The first problem I ran into, was the power connector. If you wiggled it, you lost power to the Pix. Loose connection. I decided that this was totally unacceptable, it meant that just nudging the Pix could make it reboot. So I spent a couple of hours taking it apart, understanding how the power connector worked, and tightening up the thing that needed tightening.
The next thing I did, was set up my Vodafone link, so that I'd be able to test things by logging in to servers from completely outside my own systems.
Then I took a deep breath, disconnected my old firewall, connected up the new firewall, and changed the IP address on my signup server to the non-routable. Then I rushed over to the Vodafone connection, and tried it. Oh joy! I could access the Secure Server, so that meant I could take signups without interruption, and my email would work (it's on the same server).
With that out of the way, I was ready to convert all the other servers to the new IP addresses. I got the Older Newsthumbs done first, because that affects members. And then I worked my way through all the others.
The big problem was email. I accept email for a lot of the sites that I look after, and redirect that email to the actual webmaster. That worked fine, but I also redirect some of them to myself, because I do all the webmastering for a bunch of sites. And that didn't work.
It took me a few days to finally get that working. I won't tell you all the false starts and dead ends I went through to sort it out, but I'll tell you the eventual answer was to set up another DNS server for my internal servers to use, that resolves the server names to the non-routable addresses. Once that was done, all the email routed correctly.
And in the middle of all that, I had a power cut, and the automatically-starting generator didn't automatically start, so I had a bunch of servers that powered down and had to be brought back up again. And, as usually happens in this situation, one of the servers didn't come up, and wouldn't you know it, it was one of the name servers. So I had to nurse it back to operation, and then *another* name server went down, and that turned out to be a dead power supply, so I replaced that power supply and brought it back. And I then decided, I need to build a few new name servers to replace the very old ones that I'm currently using.
My bandwidth monitor system, which gives me a graph of how much of my 2 mbit bandwidth I'm using, was using statistics collected from the old firewall. So I had to rewrite that to collect stats from the Pix. Not too difficult, since I've already done that once for the Pix at Watford (and that demonstrates the advantage of using the same devices in both places).
But now it's all working, and I no longer need to worry about the 256 computer limit that I had before, plus my firewall is (I hope) more reliable than the homebrew that I was using before.
The new cam system is up. The main difference, is that the cost is $3/minute.
We tried 10c per minute. We tried 25c/minute. But they weren't successful, because unless the performers get adequate income, they aren't willing to spend their time in front of the cameras.
I'd hoped that at the lower prices, the volume of people would make up for the low per minute price, but that didn't happen.
Nothing new.
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.
We cure any desease!
Well, about time!
%OFFER a service that helps people get laid!
%TONS %HOTTIES are %INYOURAREA, %READYTOHOOKUP!
%FLOWERS people here %JUSTCARE ;)
%ALSO, %PERCENTAGE of %MEMBERS %ALREADY!
I think you need to check the syntax of your spamming system.
Get your deploma today
Get your spelling checker today.
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.
Another new site, Naughty Nuriye
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 an Easter gift!
Member | Posts |
| TomNine | 2086 |
| hiram2000 | 1930 |
| boomerflex | 1871 |
| Terry | 1767 |
| tre1313 | 1693 |
| zig563 | 1451 |
| Jerroll | 1294 |
| rainer0000 | 1193 |
| buffy18976 | 1183 |
| madman3579 | 1179 |
| shad349 | 1131 |
| steve5924 | 995 |
| mit19237 | 867 |
| gaily304 | 857 |
| mac999 | 815 |
| dday888 | 736 |
| rob2006 | 729 |
| bro007 | 671 |
| TaraC601 | 608 |
| Jabber | 480 |
Tom is now chatter uno, with Hiram and Boomer close behind.
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.
2192 posts this month.
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| Politics and sport again. | HomoAncient and Jabber have pushed Steve and Zig off the top spot.4 |
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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| It's still about FBBs, wrestling and mixed action. | The Grinch is back |
You can get a PC in a whiskey bottle
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of February 2006, there were about 886,000 pictures (69 gigabytes), 172 gigabytes of video, 10,000 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 242 gigabytes. There's about 175 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.