We looked into why the Black Dragon wasn't starting. After a lot of toying around, we again believe the motherboard has died.  It is my guess the first RAM socket, or the electronics next to it are bad.  The only thing the system does on boot up is give a very fast series of beeps.  With everything else removed, this symptoms continues. If we remove the RAM completely, the beeps are different.  But so far, that seems to be the only thing that makes a difference.  Things don't look good for the Black Dragon.

    After a long wait for all parts to arrive, the Red Dragon has been build and is now functional. This duel AMD 1.6 GHz machine kicks a lot of butt. In building the Red Dragon, we took down the Black Dragon to take some hard drives, sound card and video card.  Unfortunately, when we tried to restart the Black Dragon, it wouldn't boot.

    The Iron Dragon returns a repaired and fully functioning system!  Apparently, the motherboard was bad (I had suspected a bad connector-- which might have been the case).  Now that it has been replaced, everything is well again.

    Western Digital confirms they have received the defective drives and will be shipping replacements within a week.

    After a long talk on the phone with Dell tech support, it was determined the Iron Dragon has a fault , but which component is known.  So, rather than have someone come out to fix it like they usually do, I had to send it in.
    What?  You didn't know there was a problem with the Iron Dragon?  Yeah... ever since the last guy fixed it, I can't move it.  If I do, it locks up wherever it is. 

    Pluvius called us and said the last of the parts for the Red Dragon have arrived.  We met at his house to put everything together.  After a lot of work assembling everything... it didn't work.  After a lot of head banging, we found the new motherboard to be DOA.  That's annoying!

    We say our goodbyes to the Azure Dragon.  With the Linux port complete and running well, the suport of the Azure Dragon is no longer needed.  It has served us well.

    So how did we do in the month of November?  Well, up until the 24th we were doing better then normal.  Then, the numbers dropped off shapely.  Why?  Too much internal traffic at Park Place.  Bandwidth was taxed so high that pages took several seconds to load-- which is not a good way to keep visitors.

DrQue.net daily averages Hits/day 5,566.27 Byte/day 247,818,513.07 Visitors/day 181.10

Our busyest day last month was the 12th where we received 8,631 hits.  On the 5th, we sent out 1,584,816,128 bytes.

    Both of the dysfunctional drives from the Black Dragon have been sent back to Western Digital.  We got a look at our new 10,000 RPM drive as it arrived a few days ago.  Looks like any other drive, but is noticeably more heavy.  The case for the Red Dragon has been an issue.  Originally it was sold out, so we put ourselves on a waiting list.  After changing the estimated arrival date twice, it disappeared from the site all together.  But, we've found an other source and the order is in.  The case is the last part before we can begin assembling the Red Dragon.
    We were pushing upwards of 6000 hits a day this month, until my other room mates started eating all of the bandwidth.  Typically, we never have a problem with everyone taking their share of the 768k/bits of bandwidth we have.  But this month it's started to become an issue.  The site slows down so much, I think most people just give up.  This may become an issue.

    The Black Dragon is back!  A pretty quick turn around time, but our new motherboard arived yesterday and was install this after noon.  After some driver updates, we were back in busness.
    Some issues that sill need to be resolved, however.  We still have two hard drives down-- one of the RAID mirror drives and a 60 gig.  Both are under warrantee, so we just need to return them.