Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - July 2010
A hard man is good to beat
Phew, what a scorcher! The temperature got as high as 30 degrees!
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Movies added this month.
Running well.
The swap-out at Watford went fairly well, but in the course of it, five more computers went down, so I had to beaver away at getting things sorted out. When I looked at the failed computers, the most common source of failure was the power supply, followed by hard disk failures.
Then, towards the end of the month, a major disaster struck. Here's what happened.
I had to reboot my main (internal, not customer facing) data server, and in doing so, I noticed that the raid was degraded. I'd configured it as four drives doing the work of three, and that means that if one dies, work can continue. That's called "Raid Five". Don't ask why. And what you're supposed to do is replace the faulty drive with a good one, and it sorts itself out automatically so that once again, four are doing the work of three. It sounds great - it means that a drive failure is only a very small problem. In theory.
So I took the server apart, and replaced the faulty drive, put it all back together, and it continued to work, and (hopefully) the new drive was being clued up by the old ones. I say "hopefully", because I can't see a way to find out what's actually happening. And when I did reboot to check, it didn't seem to be doing it.
A few days later, the whole thing failed.
I'm left with the feeling that my cunning plan of using Raid 5 for extra reliability, didn't work. Just the opposite, in fact. And it happened while I was doing a tape backup. Of course.
So I was left without a main server. You can imagine the feeling. It's like standing for a wedding photo and realising that you left your trousers at home.
So I built another server, and restored yesterday's backup (this server is *so* important, it gets backed up in a few different ways), and for this I used a backup that was done to another computer.
But! The previous incarnation of that server used version 4 of Fedora Linux, and that's several years old now, so I wanted to update to Fedora 13. That wouldn't work, it didn't seem to want to recognise the drives, and I didn't really have the time to mess about, so I used Fedora 12. That installed fine (this time I was using a mirrored raid, with a hot spare, I still have some faith in this idea), but then all sorts of things didn't work, because the version of Linux is so much later. So I had to reinstall various things that are needed to make this site happen, and try to remember how I'd done it several years ago; I do make notes of tricky installs, but my notes were on the dead computer, so I had to restore that first ... you see how this goes? I mean. One of the things I need, runs under DOS, would you believe, and it's such a vital part of the scheme that for a while I was running a windows computer just so that I could use Dos. Now I run a Dos emulator under Linux, which is much more convenient, but that means I had to install it, and work out why it was then segmentation faulting (it wanted the magic phrase "sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0" and do not ask me what that means, but thank you Google). And similar hassles.
Anyway. About 24 hours later (and that means about 20 hours of work, four of sleep) I was back in action. Whew!
Here's the full list of DtV family web sites
Member | Posts |
| buffy18976 | 273 |
| fcum2005 | 121 |
| bro007 | 90 |
| TomNine | 67 |
| thanquol83 | 52 |
| steve5924 | 32 |
| boomerflex | 19 |
| mkap756 | 7 |
| warpiggyno | 6 |
| gaily304 | 4 |
| kmurphy62 | 4 |
| zenkalidas | 4 |
| gee1407 | 3 |
| rob2010 | 3 |
| Jerroll | 2 |
The usual folks are still the top chatters
1182 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 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 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 June 2010, there were about 1,210,000 pictures (188 gigabytes), 404 gigabytes of video, 12,900 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 594 gigabytes. There's about 420 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.