We aplied style sheets to the Member's Area and gave it a new look-- much better.

    October is a great time of year-- the day light dwindles, the air cools and the trees turn the landscape into a sea of reds, yellows and browns.  Halloween sits at the end of the month, marking a scary beginning to the cold months ahead.  And I love it!
    For this month, we've changed the banner to include my pumpkin from last year.  The face design was done by Tazz, carved by me and the pumpkin itself came from a cute little place in northern Illinois called the Pumpkin Patch.

    Statistics for the month of September are in with a grand total of 169,405 hits for the month.

DrQue.net daily averages Hits/day 5,646.83 Byte/day 295,932,859.73 Visitors/day 177.03

Our busyest day last month was the 22th where we received 8,884 hits.  On the 23th, we sent out 1,347,238,912 bytes. Have a look at the graphs

    It's too bad people have to sleep... worked resumed on the Indigo Dragon and the Gentoo install is well underway. 

    The generous donation of an AMD 400MHz and ATI video card bring me enough parts to build the Indigo Dragon-- my Gentoo Linux experimental box.  This box will be a more up-to-date Linux test box, which is a pretty good step up from the Green Dragon.
    In preparation for the Gentoo install, we needed to retrieve the 45 gig IBM drive currently in the White Dragon.  This meant the White Dragon had to come down briefly so we could do this.  Since our site is fairly busy, I want no downtime-- even if it's just a few minutes.  So, we did a good deal of work on the Azure Dragon, getting PHP and MySQL to run on that system.  The Apache config file was then updated with all the correct virtual host information, database information synced and the everything tested out.  When all looked well, all the major dynamic pages we're modified to specify no changes were allowed while the system was undergoing maintenance  We then switched the router to directed web traffic to the Azure Dragon and thoroughly tested our primary sites.  When all looked good, we could continue work on the White Dragon.
    The White Dragon was only down briefly-- just long enough to retrieve the extra hard drive.  Then back on it's feet and back to handling web traffic.  Good stuff! :)

    The comment script used on the King's Quest walkthrough goes to BananaFunk.com.  BananaFunk is run by Zen and Rossie.  This is my start at cleaning up scripts I've written and making them public as well as helping a sister website out.

    I wrote a new script that allows people to leave their own comments on the pages of the walkthrough.  The PHP and MySQL online documentation has a fetcher like this, and I thought it would be great for the King's Quest walkthrough.  Six hours of coding, and I created what I'm quite pleased with. 
    Unfortunately, I ran into a bug with Apache I wasn't pleased with.  It seems the rewrite engine doesn't work on the White Dragon and would cause segmentation faults each time a rewrite function was executed.  I needed to do a mass redirect since all the HTML pages became PHP pages-- and I didn't want the search engines to get 404 on all the old pages. 
    I did a lot of testing and searching on the net.  Apache and PHP using pretty much the same build configuration on the Green Dragon did not have this problem.  So, I guess I'm stuck.  I ended up adding about 100 individual redirect lines to the King's Quest virtual host directive.

    Matt "Rossie" Rose (Pyroskankic.DrQue.net) thought me a little about CSS and some things I can do to bring out the look in the Story Board.  It's been on my list of things to do, so I'm pleased.  Rossie has gone to school for web design and he knows a good deal about putting together sites.  Thankx Rossie! 
    Together with our good friend Zen, Rossie's latest project has been BananaFunk.com and it looks pretty good.  We've discussed using my story board script for BananaFunk.

    Sitting at 90,000 hits for this month-- not too bad for the halfway mark :)  For some reason, traffic has increased noticeably in the last week or two.  We went from just over 4,000 hits a day to over 5,000 hits a day.  We're not sure why all of a sudden, but it's interesting.
    I went and added individual log files for each of the virtual hosts on DrQue.net, which includes some 20 or so sub-domains and 4 root domains (DrQue.net, Phucker.com, MMSof.com and Pluvius.net).  We had added a log for the King's Quest walkthrough earlier and discovered it accounts for around 50% of all the traffic on our site-- partly because it is a larger site (i.e. a good deal of pages involved).  It also generates a large number of unique visitors.  Some other areas of our site draw more return traffic.

    The Green Dragon got some runtime today.  It's been one of the first days cool enough to boot this dude.  We did a lot of playing around on the experimental Linux box.  Learned how to use NFS so the Green and White Dragon could talk; got Samba working so the box talked to most of the network; and started to build Apache.  The original idea was to have the Green Dragon take the job of a backup server.  We've had some things we want to experiment with on the White Dragon, and the non-Linux machines don't do a great job of being a backup server-- no dynamic content.  Unfortunately, we realized a little latter the Green Dragon has a 1.5 gig hard drive, 200 megs of which were free.  Presently, DrQue.net's public side is sitting at a cool 1.5 gigs.  The Green Dragon just isn't going to work as a backup box.
    Parted out is a donation from our good friend Pluvius-- an AMD 400MHz motherboard with RAM.  He have a power supply and hard drive to go with him, but lack a case.  We're thinking this may become an other Dragon in the near future, and become the officinal backup box.