Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - February 2010
A hard man is good to beat
More snow, more country-at-a-standstill. We're running out of road grit. Still, we should be seeing the snowdrops any time now. On January 31, I saw the first lamb of the year!
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Movies added this month.
Running well.
The second new Herbiceps server is working fine now. I tracked the problem in the previous one down, it was a faulty hard drive. And it was straight out of the packaging! I'll return it for a replacement.
I got a scary letter from my electricity company, they're going to cut off my power for several hours to do "essential work". That, of course, is more than my UPSes can handle. So I ordered a gasoline generator, so that the most important machines can still run.
This won't affect 99% of the site, because that's all at my colocation in Watford. But the servers in the Valkyrie Data Shed here need power; all the secure servers, the name servers, and some other assorted stuff. With the generator, I'll be able to keep everything running, except the Older Newsthumbs, which is spread over so many servers, I can't power them all. This all should happen on 21 January (I'm writing this the week before).
January 15, the generator arrived; it took nearly a week to get here, because of the snow. The first problem was that it needed to be filled with oil, and the hole for pouring oil into isn't easily accessible. I used one of those things you use for putting soap powder into a washing machine. And then I had to mop up quite a lot of spilled oil. Putting gasoline in was easy, and it started up just fine.
The second problem was that it didn't have a standard UK socket, it had some sort of external-type socket. I solved that by making up an adaptor.
The third problem was, when I tried to use it to power my UPSes, they would only take 0.1 amp, and that wasn't enough to stop them running down, they need 0.4 amps. Why? I don't know. They work fine on the 240 volts on a wall socket, but not on the 240 volts frmo the generator. Maybe thewaveform isn't sine enough? I tried putting an isolating transformer between the UPS and the generator; nice idea, but it didn't work. But I found that this was only true for one of the types of UPS I use; the others were OK. So I had to change the UPSes on a bunch of computers that I wanted to keep running.
Eventually, I had power cables strung all over the place from the generator, an ammeter so I could see the current draw (this generator will only give me about 2 kw, which translates to 8 amps, maybe 10 if I'm lucky). And I started up the genny (that's what everyone calls them) and switched power over from the mains. I was pulling about 5 amps, and I'm happy with that, it means I have a bit to spare. The test worked. I'll be powering the Secure Server, the main internal data servers, the nameservers, the mail servers, the servers that run the various message boards, the internal nameserver, the ethernet switches, the firewalls (I use three firewalls, don't ask) and the router to the outside world. I think that lot will mean that most people won't see any interruption in service, except for the Older Newsthumbs, which I already decided to let go for the hours of no power.
I've also ordered three additional UPSes, because a couple of the UPSes that I have in place, don't do the job they were supposed to be doing. That's not too surprising, they are *very* old, and their lead-acid batteries don't last for more than a few years. I hadn't know that they weren't working, because I haven't had a power cut for so long!
So I'm now (it's Jan 16) ready for the big switch-off.
...
And then, two days before the big switch-off, they sent me another letter, telling me that the switch-off has been cancelled.
They have NO IDEA how much trouble they've put me to.
Later ... the switch-off will now be on February 9th. At least I'm ready for it!
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.
Here's the full list of DtV family web sites
Member | Posts |
| buffy18976 | 2871 |
| gman1952 | 2351 |
| boomerflex | 2317 |
| steve5924 | 787 |
| bro007 | 523 |
| TomNine | 509 |
| Jerroll | 479 |
| gman4409 | 196 |
| fcum2005 | 173 |
| lpdorman69 | 107 |
| mit19237 | 29 |
| ginny2442 | 20 |
| gaily304 | 16 |
| normb747 | 11 |
| 5h4h4r | 10 |
| gee1407 | 9 |
| simon1979 | 6 |
| hassel7132 | 6 |
| mike999 | 6 |
| chester44 | 5 |
The usual folks are still the top chatters
1353 posts this month.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Buffy's Pub exploded |
ChelseaFC and SW6er posting large |
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 |
| Buffy's Pub, of course | The scissors board is very active. |
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of January 2010, there were about 1,134,000 pictures (133 gigabytes), 390 gigabytes of video, 12,600 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 525 gigabytes. There's about 400 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.