Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - September 2016
Still a great summer, but I didn't see much of it.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Movies added this month.
Running fine
At last, the 100 megabit line arrived! After nearly two years of waiting. So I spent a lot of time this month moving everything over to it.
I've mentioned the new big servers that I bought - one big Dell Poweredge 805 with 64 gb of memory and two quad-core processors will carry the load, replacing several that did it previously. And if that fails (because that's what computers do), I have three more sitting behind it, unused except for copying what's on the big server. So if it goes down, I can immediately switch the load.
The others are a Poweredge 2950, a 2850 and two 1950s. Each of these has about 16 terabytes of disk attached.
So the big week happened, and I had to A) configure my Pix 525 firewall, B) change the routing on each of the computers, C) change the DNS to point to the new IP addresses, sort out reverse DNS, check that the Secure Server still works (it gets an A rating from Qualsys). All of these servers are running the latest version of linux, Fedora 24.
What does all this mean for my customers? Not much, really. Things will be faster, but not so much that you'd notice because the bottlenecks aren't in my systems. It should all be more reliable, but breakdowns have been pretty rare anyway. There was a period of about 24 hours during which the services were patchy, byut that was partly because it takes time for the new DNS resolutions to propagate throughout the internet, and partly because I made one tiny, but critical, mistake in setting up the DNS servers (now fixed).
It's been hard work for a week, but I'm pleased with the results.
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 August 2016, there were about 1,562,000 pictures (345 gigabytes), 545 gigabytes of video, 16294 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 891 gigabytes. There's 605,000,000 pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.