The Indigo Dragon took the show for awhile while we compiled Apache 1.33, mod_ssl 2.8.22, and OpenSSL 0.9.7e.  It's been quite awhile since we've updated Apache and before we did it I wanted to be sure we had a backup server.

    Updates to the power distribution system for the server array are made, including an additional UPS, wiring updates and cable organization.

    The Indigo-Dragon, after a lot of work, now has a fully functional setup capable of backing up DrQue.net.  A lot of work went into compiling/installing all the necessary software, but we now have all the steps covered and results are good.
    Having a backup server is nice for a number of reasons.  We can now shutdown the White-Dragon for hardware updates-- something we just don't do these days.

    A 23,105 visitors toatling 478,556 hits, making dwarfing our highest previous record of 260,961 hits ( August of 2004) and 8,153 visitors (March of 2004).  Most of the traffic came to the page about my sleeping quarters which was requested by 17,697 visitors-- 79.3% of everyone that showed up.

    We've repleaced the DI-704 router with a DI-624.  The new router adds wireless, more port mappings-- badly needed.  Everthing looks to be running as expected.

    The White Dragon upgrades to PHP 5.  After looking at some of the fetchers of PHP 5, we decided we must have it-- and now we do.  This compile of PHP 5 also has suport for GD library, which is nice.  For anyone that stumbles on this page trying to compile PHP 5 with MySQL, the following must be done: 
    Download MySQL "Libraries and header file" and install them
    Compile PHP 5 with "--with-mysql=/bin"
    Life will be good :)

    We pulled in record hits yesterday.  Seems my page about my sleeping quarters is providing endless amounts of amusement, having been linked from at a least two different places (here and here).  What kind of traffic are we talking about?

Daily Statistics for October 2004
Day	Hits		Files		Pages		Visits		Sites		KBytes
..	..	..	..	..	..	..	..	..	..	..	..	..
9	4166	1.94%	3191	1.65%	405	2.07%	139	1.43%	207	2.09%	522208	2.74%
10	4513	2.10%	3695	1.91%	404	2.06%	162	1.67%	228	2.31%	878114	4.61%
11	5298	2.46%	3734	1.93%	591	3.02%	165	1.70%	265	2.68%	826569	4.34%
12	6756	3.14%	4780	2.47%	497	2.54%	155	1.60%	272	2.75%	995332	5.23%
13	118877	55.31%	111642	57.75%	9654	49.30%	6929	71.43%	7045	71.30%	1974018	10.37%

     For a site that normally pulls in about 200,000 hits a month, getting 118,000 in one day is a bit of a jump!  At one point during the after noon, 4:00pm, we averaged almost 2 hits/second.  Watching the log file, we could saw many times that we were sustaining 3-4 hits/second.  I'm pleased, but that's nothing by compassion to sites like slashdot, who I once read averaged about 30 hits/second.

    Having only 750 gigs of drive space just wasn't enough.  Pluvius had 2 more 250 gig drives no one had claimed-- so we took them.  That puts the RAID-5 array at 1.5 terabytes to total drives space.  It configured with 5 drives as the array for a solid terabyte of drive space, and 1 drive as a hot spare.  This way, if we loss a drive, the spare takes over and the system hardly losses a beat.
    All this configuration means drives have moved all over.  The Red-Dragon now has 7 hard drives: the 37 gig 10k RPM boot drive and the 6 drives of the RAID-5 called Tera.  We moved the 2x 100 GB WD RAID-1 array to the Black Dragon, along with the 120 gig WD (Aux. data).  The 60 gig WD ramains orphined.  It might move into a Linux box in the near future, but no plans yet.
So, my drive array looks like this:

Red-Dragon Drive Manufactor/Type Usable size Partitions 36.7 GB SATA 10k RPM Western Digital Raptor 33.51 GB Programs, Swap, Temp 6x250 GB SATA 7,200 RPM RAID-5 Western Digital Caviar 931.54 GB Tera

Black-Dragon Drive Manufactor/Type Usable size Partitions 80 GB ATA/100 7,200 RPM IBM Deskstar 76.6 GB BlackDragon 120 GB ATA/100 7,200 RPM Western Digital Caviar 111 GB Aux. Data 2x 80 GB ATA/100 7,200 RPM RAID-1 IBM Deskstar 76.6 GB ** 100 GB ATA/100 7,200 RPM RAID-1 Western Digital Caviar 93.1 GB DataDump

White-Dragon Drive Manufactor/Type Usable size Partitions 30 GB ATA 5,400 RPM Western Digital Caviar 28 GB WhiteDragon

Indigo-Dragon Drive Manufactor/Type Usable size Partitions 45 GB ATA 5,400 RPM IBM Deskstar 40(?) GB IndigoDragon

    The Red-Dragon gets one large upgrade: 1,000 gigabytes of drive additions.  The 4x 250GB Western Digital SATA drives are configured in a RAID-5 setup that yeilds 698 gigabytes of usable space.
    So why such a lack in news?  Currently, we've been engaged in a lot of projects-- developing a web-based HMI for work, taking pictures as we study photography, writting an improved gallery script, customizing a Linux build and anything else you can think of.  We've lost some hardware-- the Iron-Dragon (laptop) lost a battery (tech suport said "it's dead-- you're lucky if they last more then a year); and a 15" monitor that now just sparks internally making it unusable.

    Running out of space, we added a Western Digital 100GB drive to the picture to take some stress of the 100 GB RAID array.  Since our digital camera joined the collection, we've eaten more then 13 gigabytes.  This storage is only a temporary solution as a larger RAID configuration system is going to be needed sometime in the future.  This drive should hold us off for a bit.