About a week ago, I noticed e-mail was not being delivered. At first, I thought this was a sendmail config problem, thinking maybe something didn't restart correctly when the White Dragon rebooted. After several very unsucessful atempts to get what seemed something very simple, I decided to abandon sendmail, and try an other e-mail server.
    So, we installed Mercury again-- our trusty e-mail server of old. It didn't work either. At this point, I was confused. Then, a thought dawned on me, I check on our ISP's site, and my suspicions were confirmed. Due to the most recent set of viruses-- SPAM sending viruses, our ISP firewalled outgoing connections to port 25. Unfortunately, I don't think we can remove this block despite the fact we are not your typical brain-dead user that wouldn't notice something like a SPAM virus.
    To get around this, we set up a mail relay on a diffrent port on a remote computer. It's setup to only accept connections from our network and relay anything we send it. Then, our server here was modified to use that relay when sending mail.
    It's kind of a long route for getting e-mail out, but it works. It's too bad most people are too stupid to be trusted with an unfirewalled internet connection-- makes things harder for those of us who can.

    After 190 days of non-stop activity, the White Dragon locked up.  DrQue.net was down for about 6 hours before it came to my attention.  The computer rebooted fine and everything came back.  Due to the White Dragon's prior record, it is my guess the heat as of late is taking it's toll.
    The Black Dragon has crashed a couple of times already, mainly when it's much warmer.  This is going to be a problem as the heat increasers for the summer months to come.

DrQue.net January daily averages Hits/day 7,929.65 Byte/day 643,871,810.06 Visitors/day 263.77

Our busiest day last month was the 12th where we received 21,304 hits-- a new record for daily hits.  On the 1th, we sent out 2,073,412 bytes.

   We set all new records for monthly hits, visitors, files and pages sent, and unique sites to make requests.  In an incredible show of support for our friend Jerry Shea, we jumped from our standard 6,000 hits a day to over 21,000 and maintained around 10,000 hits a day for the next 5 days.  Even google seemed to honor Jerry's memory, as his site showed up the 2nd day.
    In all, the month yielded almost a quarter of a million hits and just under 20 gigs of data transferred.

    Zam's computer, 'Nelson', leaves the network.  Zam moved his primary residence to Janesville and Nelson went with him.

    Our trusty Magnavox 15" monitor, after 9 years of faithful service, finally quite.  It will likely be replaced with our 17" MagView.

    Thursday, March 11, 2004, our friend Jerry Shea died.  It would come as a shock to everyone who knew him.  The following day, we constructed a memorial website to honor our friend.

    FTP has been draining our bandwidth a little too much.  With some users who have large bandwidth constantly exchanging data with our FTP server, the network has been crawling.  Our current FTP program, WarFTP, don't have bandwidth limiting.  We're looking into alternatives and we'll be switching when the right server is found.

    With the assistance of Tazz and his 12 megapixel digital camera, we've assembled some new shots of the Dragon's Den.  We did a new panoramic shot of the systems in the Dragon's Den, and from those, redid the main banner and altered the intro screen.

Some statistics on drive usage

Totals for primary Dragon Array systems Total files 515,971 Total directories 24,025 User space 260,133,412,418 Free space 77,018,820,608 Total capasity 337,152,233,026
Red Dragon Total files 249,406 Total directories 9,093 User space 115,589,659,656 Free space 66,320,723,968	Programs & FastData WD 37GB; SATA; 10,000 RPM Total files 82,400 Total directories 5,550 User space 6,109,572,596 Free space 20,960,948,224 DataDump 2xWD 100 GB; ATA/100; 7,200 RPM; RAID 1 array Total files 56,644 Total directories 3,205 User space 55,181,951,615 Free space 43,460,296,704 Ythguan WD 60GB; ATA/100; 5,400 RPM Total files 110,356 Total directories 338 User space 54,300,093,774 Free space 4,037,902,336
Black Dragon Total files 161,999 Total directories 9,772 User space 130,145,836,926 Free space 30,129,676,288	BlackDragon IBM 80GB; ATA/100; 7,200 RPM Total files 161,874 Total directories 9,764 User space 48,013,350,432 Free space 29,990,780,928 Video 2x IBM 80GB; ATA/100; 7,200 RPM; RAIR 1 array Total files 120 Total directories 8 User space 82,204,184,576 Free space 139,059,200
White Dragon Total files 104,566 Total directories 5,160 User space 14,397,915,836 Free space 10,698,096,640	WhiteDragon WD 30GB; ATA/66; 5,400 RPM Total files 104,566 Total directories 5,160 User space 14,397,915,836 Free space 10,698,096,640

     After returning, having being out of town for two weeks for work, the parts for the Black Dragon are in and everything is together-- again.  The Black Dragon is back online-- running a little less then what it has once been-- but operational and back online.  Services that have moved to other systems will slowly migrate back to the Black Dragon-- but it might be awhile before everything is perfect again.