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.

    FTP went down today after a crash on the Red Dragon.  Looks like the config file get corrupt because of the crash.  Darn non-Linux OSes and their crashing!
    I didn't bother keeping a backup for the config, since I wanted to be off the non-Linux FTP server anyway.  Since I don't have anytime, null79 is going to look into setting up a Linux based FTP server.

    Zen informed me the Crowd site is back after a replacement DSL modem was installed.

    The Garage Crowd site is down due to DSL problems at Zen's shop.  He's contacted the ISP and someone is scheduled to look at it.  Zen tells me if the site looks to be down for more then just the day, he will temporarily move it to Park Place. 

    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.