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.

    We finished a script that will run at the end of each month and save the log file reports for the month.   The new Cron job will archive all the automatically generated logfile data.  This is helpful, since we update these logs every hour.  Why?  We like to have very up-to-date stats about the site.  We also like an end of the month report summarizing all the activity during the month.
    This script was a little longer in the making then I had hoped.  It kept getting interrupted and forgotten about. 

DrQue.net January daily averages Hits/day 5,810.55 Byte/day 471,939,402.32 Visitors/day 191.84

Our busiest day last month was the 5th where we received 12,702 hits, followed closely by the 21st with 12,059.  On the 27th, we sent out 2,082,700,288 bytes.

    January sets a new record, totaling just over 180,000 hits and 13.63 gigs of data. Some events that helped contribute to this were the few days at the beginning of the month we hosted the Garage Crowd, where we took on about 3,000-4,000 more hits a day.  An update to the Drink'n Drano site also boosted hits in the middle of the month, making a couple of 10,000+ hit days.
   Near the end of the month, we found we started taking a good number of request from the Google image search for 'koala'.  We totaled 121 hits from this-- more then our total King's Quest search hits. Unfortunately, the resulting page has nothing to do with Koalas, and just happens to have a link to a picture at the bottom.  Somewhere, we lost the line in our robots.txt to disallow our image directory.
    Data transfer was relatively high-- 14,630,121,472 bytes (over 13 gigs).  This is mostly due to the Member's Area being updated with all the new data from Zen now available.
    Overall, the month of January did much better then December.  A lot of this has to do with ditching unlimitable P2P network traffic.  Consolidating to a system with send/receive caps keeps bandwidth for the web server, and general browsing activities which had been seriously crippled.

    After a bit of research into the various options, I've decided what will be used to get the Black Dragon back on it's feet.  Pluvius is upgrading a computer for someone, and is going to sell me the old EPoX motherboard.   In addition, we have ordered a HighPoint RAID parallel ATA controller. An other friend, Tazz, is selling me an extra stick of 256 MBs of SDRAM.  The 1024 MBs of RAM currently in the system is 266 MHz DDR, and Pluvius is buying it off us.  This should bring the Black Dragon back to functional so it can again be a drive server.

    Zen, who's storage capacity has exceeded my own for about 3 months with his first drive upgrade, has upgraded again-- this time, adding 500 gigs to his collection.  This brings the online capacity of our network to 1211.63 gigs. By himself, Zen controls almost 1.5 terabytes of storage-- a number that belittles even some hardcores.  Very nice Zen...
    Our drive research has been pushing towards RAID 5 arrays of 4 to 8 drives.  The cost involved is relatively high-- at least initially.  But the total storage and redundancy are unmatched with other options.  Despite our own thirst for storage, we're going to hold off on upgrading capacity for awhile.  One of the concerns we'll have to address is where to physically place all these drives.  The Black Dragon will control at least the 80 RAID 1 array, taking 2 of 6 3½" drive bays.  There are 4x5¼" drive bays, 2 of which hold CD-ROM drives. The ROM drives can move as the Black Dragon doesn't really need them, but we will still require brackets. We will also need to come up with a method to mount a cooling fan to blow across any drives we mount in 5¼" bays.  The other option, or an additional option, is to make a mounting bracket under the existing 3½" drive bays.  This could fix at least 3 more drives, there is already a cooling fan located there.  With some work, we may be able to house 13 drives in the Black Dragon's case.  But there are still a lot of issues with that-- cooling and power being amongst the primary concerns.

    The White Dragon hit 100 days of continuous runtime today.  We haven't needed to shutdown/reboot the system for more then 3 months.  The last time the White Dragon went off-line was for hardware changes-- I believe to extract the 45 gig drive that went to the Indigo Dragon.
    We've also noted that with all the mapped resources, we have over 745 gigs of storage. Of that, we use over 618 gigs (about 82%).  This doesn't include redundant storage (i.e. the RAID 1 mirrors), the X-box and mobel storage, which add around 520 gigs.
    Sitting at over 80% capasity, we need more storage.  Everyday, our data collection grows a little more.  With storage costs between $0.66 to $0.90 per gig, depending on drive density, we have some options.  However, with the quanties of data we now house, redundancy is now becomming more important then ever.  This basicly double the cost of drive space. 

    As it turns out, the distribute of the Black Dragon's new motherboard no longer carries it, so we can't get it replaced with the RMA-- they've just refunded us. We've also seen that Soyo dropped their warrantee on those motherboard to 90 days.  So, we're not going to get a new Soyo Dragon for the Black Dragon. 
    The problem is, trying to find a new motherboard with parallel RAID.  It's not all that popular anymore as everyone is switching to the better serial ATA RAID controllers. That's cool and all, but we have 2 parallel RAID arrays we need to have controller for, and the Black Dragon was suppose to be a drive server.  We can either buy a motherboard that has parallel RAID, buy one without and get a parallel RAID controller card, or offload the old parallel hard drives and switch to serial ATA and get a serial ATA RAID motherboard.  We haven't yet decided.
    In other news, we have generated a new PGP keypair. The key ID is 0xDCEC9590 and the key public key can be downloaded here.