Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - February 2007
A hard man is good to beat
It was so much warmer than it was in December, the snowdrops are in full bloom, and the daffodils are showing their buds.
Galleries added this month.
Here's a strange thing.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
We're getting about 10gb of stuff per day.
We filled up another server with old newsthumbs, so I've brought a new one into action.
Nothing new.
This is the month of the Big Upgrade. There's been people getting slow downloads on a couple of the sites I look after, and that mystified me for a long time. I checked the server loading - that looked fine. I know that I've got plenty of spare bandwidth, because I checked the bandwidth charts. At first I thought it might be some bottleneck with one major packet transit operator, but that got ruled out too. Eventually, I decided that, despite the evidence of the server loading, the problem was indeed the loading on my server, that it wasn't supplying data fast enough to people who had fast DSL lines.
The first thing I did, was to switch most of the big sites from being looked after by a single server, to being looked after by three servers. First, I copied the data onto two servers - that was easier than it sounds, because I've always kept a backup server in reserve (and also a second backup). So it was just a matter of getting those really up-to-date.
Then I changed the DNS for them (that's the thing that translates things like www.example.com to things like 122.223.113.224). That was easier than it sounds too; it turns out that if you give a list of different servers to resolve to www.example.com, then the DNS server will give out the addresses in rotation, so the effect of that would be to split the load roughly evenly between the three servers. I had to change the password subsystem to update all passwords to all three servers, and I had to arrange things so that when the "master" server was updated, the two "slaves" would be too.
There was some initial teething problems, things that I'd forgotten to do, but after a couple of days, this scheme seemed to be running smoothly, and even better, it seemed to have fixed the "slow download" problem. Some people have commented to that effect on the message board.
But that was just phase 1.
Phase 2, is to upgrade the servers themselves. Mostly, I'm using servers that are Celeron 2.4 or 2.8, with a couple of Pentium 3.2s. But the cpu speed isn't the issue with this - I think it's more to do with the disk speed. For disks, I've been using Maxtor 300gb ATA drives. They seem to be reliable, and they're pretty inexpensive.
For the upgrade, I decided to use Pentium 3.4. You can get 3.6, but they're a *lot* more expensive, for about 5% extra speed, and cpu isn't where the bottleneck is anyway. More memory would help a little bit; most of the servers have 1 gb, and I decided to increase that to 2gb. Memory makes disk access faster, by using caching. But that doesn't help when serving big files.
The main thing I needed, was faster drives. I got that partly by moving from ATA drives to the faster SATA (Serial ATA) drives. But the main thing that will make these systems faster, is that I'll be using RAID 0. RAID 0 means that when a file is written or read, it's distributed among all the drives in the system. Since each drive is doing a share of the work, the overall speed is improved.
So I ordered, from my usual supplier (who thought Christmas had arrived again), ten motherboards, ten Pentium 3.6s, 20 1gb memory sticks, ten Adaptec RAID controllers, and three cartons of hard drives (there's 20 in a carton). You don't want to know the cost, it'll make your eyes water.
After a bit of haggling (if you ask for a discount, you often get one), all the goodies arrived, and I started a frenzy of computer building. It was after I built the first one, that I discovered a major problem.
I like to set my servers so that if you power them off, then on again, they start up. This means that I can do a power cycle remotely, because all the power leads go via a remote power switch. But with these motherboards, although the documentation said that you could set them to do that, the menu item on the Bios setup screen, simply wasn't there!
I tried upgrading the Bios to the latest version on the Asrock web site. That didn't help. So I tried "upgrading" the Bios to the oldest version. Why? I don't know, maybe, I thought, the facility had been there but got lost in a later version? I'll never know. Because after I'd put that oldest Bios in place, the motherboard refused to start up. That's annoying rather than disastrous - those mobos only cost about $60.
So I'll engineer around the problem. I have a remote relay system that I can control from any serial port, which gives me eight on-off switches. I wire that to the "Start" button on the computer, and then it can be started up either by pressing the start button, or by the remote relay system.
I also had some Foxconn mobos hanging around, and I used those; they don't suffer from this problem. And I have a slightly older Asrock mobo, which has the same model number as the ones that have the problem - and that one doesn't have the problem. I hate it when you can't rely on things that should be the same, to be the same.
Hmm. On second thoughts, I'll use some more Foxcomm mobos for the servers at Watford, and I'll use the ones that need the remote relay system, here.
Currently, I have seven servers at Watford that are ripe for replacement. I've got the ten I built under continuous test, and I'll install the seven that best survive. I'm using Fedora (Red Hat) core 6, the latest version. Installing this takes about three minutes per computer, because I'm doing it over my network. It takes me a lot longer, though, to configure each computer the way I want it.
In building those servers, I've discovered that
So, I've replaced the mobos that can't remote reboot, with more Foxcomms; I'll use the others here. Because I'm here with them, it's not a problem if I can't remote reboot - but I'll use the relay system anyhow.
So now I've got ten servers on long term test, because if I get a failure, I want it to be before I ship them out to Watford. A couple of minor problems did show up, and I've replaced a couple of power supplies.
The big upgrade was planned for January 31. It went well; I installed nine of the servers I'd built. The next step will be to configure them for use, and get them into action.
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.
I now get about 2000 spams per day. My despammer works quite well, only a
couple of dozen get through, and it's very rare that a real email gets into
my spam folder. But I've divided the spam folder into two, one spammier than
the other. The spammier folder, is for spam that meets all the criteria for
spam, and also isn't addressed to me. That helps a lot, because I do look through both
spam folders, but I pay less attention to the spammier one.
Ddeb deeb, dfeb eaeb ebeb eceb.
Aab abb acb adb aeb, afb bab bbb. Cacb cbcb cccb cdcb cecb cfcb! Fecb
ffcb aadb abdb. Bbcb bccb bdcb becb bfcb cacb cbcb cccb, cdcb! Bedb,
bfdb, cadb cbdb ccdb cddb cedb, cfdb.
Oh, I know. I have the same thing, especially when it rains.
Save candle-ends on branded quality medications!
Huh?
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
Member | Posts |
| TomNine | 1145 |
| Jerroll | 1079 |
| boomerflex | 844 |
| buffy18976 | 780 |
| micha74 | 601 |
| ginny2442 | 513 |
| gaily304 | 505 |
| rainer0000 | 480 |
| madman3579 | 396 |
| bro007 | 336 |
| mit19237 | 285 |
| minion666 | 274 |
| shad349 | 230 |
| jcc115 | 148 |
| mac999 | 141 |
| dwk2006 | 141 |
| gee1407 | 121 |
| hiram2000 | 116 |
| invinci75 | 111 |
| drop112 | 97 |
All the usual people.
2395 posts this month.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| A vigorous debate about religion is pushing the statistics along. | HomoAncient and Terry are the leaders; HA and Terry are going hammer and tongs on the religion board, plus some of the abuse board. |
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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| Scooby's board hits the number one spot. | The grinch got the stats |
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of January 2007, there were about 950,000 pictures (79 gigabytes), 231 gigabytes of video, 11,000 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 311 gigabytes. There's about 225 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.