Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - November 2016
Summer has persisted into October, which is nice, but we've just put the clocks back, so it gets dark sooner, and now it feels like summer is almost over. But that means it'll be spring in a few months!
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Movies added this month.
Running fine; it's on a server called igdal. Igdal collects the news and makes the thumbnails, and when that's done, it's all copied to the main server.
Now that I've got everything running in the Data Shed, I have a lot more flexibility. And it's a lot easier for me to fix problems.
I've installed the Cisco ASA 5510 firewall, and it came with the ASDM web-based user interface, which makes changing the configuration so much easier. I used the command line interface to transfer the configuration from the Pix 515E to the new firewall, and I'll keep that Pix as my firewall backup. I'm keen to have a firewall backup, because if the firewall goes down, everything becomes inaccessible until I install a new firewall. With the Pix 5i5E sitting there next to the ASA 5510, all I have to do it change the connection of three ethernet cables and power it on.
On the main server, the system drive that I installed to replace the one that failed, also failed! So I did the same thing I did before - switch the load to the backup server, and install a new system drive on the main server. I was monitoring traffic while this happened, and I don't think anyone noticed that anything had happened! So after installation, I switched back to the main server, and everything has been running fine since then.
Speaking of backups - I read a horror story about a RAID system. One of the drives in the RAID failed, so the system manager replaced the failed drive and told the RAID to update. Whereupon the RAID trashed itself. I don't use RAID, I don't trust it. Instead, I have backups. My main server is backed up once per hour to the primary backup, and that's why, when my main server has a problem, I can immediately switch over to the backup.
But backup doesn't end there. I have FOUR more servers, each of which is also a backup of the main server. Each day, I do full backup (using rsync) to one of those, in rotation.
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 October 2016, there were about 1,563,000 pictures (346 gigabytes), 545 gigabytes of video, 16397 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 892 gigabytes. There's 615,000,000 pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.