Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - January 2013
It's cold, and wet, and miserable. I love the climate here!
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Movies added this month.
Running OK. I did a server-swap, the current newsthumbs were full.
Seven more servers are being prepared to replace those that have failed or partially failed, down at my colocation.
Also, I've been trying to reduce my power consumption at the Valkyrie Data Center. I've eliminated three computers, by giving their functions to two computers that weren't heavily used. So, for example, the computer that I was using purely as a terminal to log in to other computers, is now also acting as a name server for my internal purposes.
I'm also looking into making considerable use of a small computer (and when I say small, the power consumption is 2.5 watts, compared with a couple of hundred for the usual servers). It's looking good! I've got eight of them up and running, and they haven't crashed. They're called "Raspberry Pi". The other big advantage of this computer, is that it costs $35. THat's not a typo - thirty five dollars. and for that, you get a real PC, with 512mb memory, ethernet, two USB ports, HDMI output and a socket for an SD card, on which you have the operating system and data. Linux, or course, is free, so the only extra cost to me is the power supply, and for that, I'm using old PC power supplies; I've found that one of them will power four Raspberries.
I've also found that I can attach a hard drive to it (or indeed several), and probably anything else I can think of.
I've replaced one of my firewalls with something more substantial; a Sonicwall was replaced by a Cisco Pix. The Sonicwall was working OK, but it only allows 20 rules, and I wanted to be able to have more than that. The Pix is a 515 which is total overkill for what it's doing, but I had it lying around doing nothing, so ...
Here's the full list of DtV family web sites
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of December 2012, there were about 1,464,000 pictures (295 gigabytes), 429 gigabytes of video, 14340 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 725 gigabytes. There's about 565 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.