• Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

    =====================
    Posted 08/15/2025
    =====================


    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

    =====================
    Addendum: 01/10/2026
    =====================


    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

About the down time last night (02-27-2019)

WebSlave

WebSlave

It is what it is, but certainly not what it was.
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Apparently an update of one of the server's main software modules made my message board sites incompatible with the version of PHP running, knocking them offline. This filled up my mail server queue to where my ISP started rejecting emails thinking I was being spam attacked, even though I was deleting them as fast as I could while they were coming in. The server guys found the problem after about 4 hours or so, and indicated that putting a different operating system on the server should keep that from happening in the future. Of course this new OS costs additional per month, but I figure it might be worth not having to buy a couple bottles of Excedrin in the long haul. :hair_on_fire:

Not sure when it will be installed, but certainly the server will need to be offline during that time. And also not sure if this new OS will cause it's own problems with other modules or this older software I am running. I'll try to give a heads up if I can.

So beware. It's not like I just got fed up and pulled the plug, which I am sure likely was running through some people's minds.
 
I used to run a couple boards. When I see this one down I just go meh, It will be fixed. Upgrade, screw up, rinse repeat, lol
 
If it's any consolation I see that happen in my day job periodically. Fortunately Outlook let me create rules to send the ensuing 'OMG THE APP BROKE FIX ME' spam from the servers straight to the recycle bin.
 
bcr229 said:
If it's any consolation I see that happen in my day job periodically. Fortunately Outlook let me create rules to send the ensuing 'OMG THE APP BROKE FIX ME' spam from the servers straight to the recycle bin.
Click to expand...

Yes, I do that too, but the volume of error messages just chokes up the pipeline enough to quickly shut it down completely. I could do that at the server level, but then I wouldn't receive anything to alert me of a problem. I don't recall seeing any setting that would effectively do a "Only send one notice through, but kill the rest of them."
 
Had to postpone this for a bit, but it will likely take place within the next week. If things go well, the site shouldn't be down for more than an hour or so. But if things go bad, well, might take a couple of days rebuilding the server from the backups. And with any luck the backups will not be corrupted for one reason or another. :shrug01:

If I get a warning of when it will actually commence, I will try to give some warning and close down the site during the OS change.
 
Oh, this could turn out to be REAL fun. I'm going to a completely different OS, so lots of unknowns there. And the real fun part is if things go real bad, it's not just a matter of rolling back to the old OS. No siree bob, the server will have to have everything reloaded from scratch. :ack2:

That reminds me, I need to check with them to make certain that some of the tweaks we needed to do to PHP and MySQL are going to be retained with the new OS.

Wonder how much stuff is going to get broken with this?
 
They're not moving you to new servers with the new OS? That's what we would do. Then when we were certain the new ones were stable we would decommission the old ones.
 
bcr229 said:
They're not moving you to new servers with the new OS? That's what we would do. Then when we were certain the new ones were stable we would decommission the old ones.
Click to expand...
Agreed... that always makes the most sense when working with production systems. It's what we do at work as well.

If you don't mind me asking, Rich, what OS's are we talking here?

Sent via the android pony express
 
The server I got from them was kind of a custom job, so quite likely they just don't have them sitting around at the data center. The server tech guys seem to be pretty competent, so I think they really aren't expecting any problems.

The new OS will be CloudLinux.
 
I've heard good things about cloud Linux as a server os. Stable and lightweight. Haven't played with it though. Playing around with Linux mint at home though.
 
The server guys have been touting the increased security that OS offers. They seem to be real big on that aspect of server management.
 
The OS change is supposed to take place on Sunday, 03/24 at 2am GMT-7. Whenever the heck THAT is.

Anyway, try not to be creating posts or new threads at that time, as when the server is brought down, everything you are in the middle of will likely be lost.

Hopefully when I roll out of bed everything will be running OK. If not, well, I might just go back to bed and stay there. :face_palm_02:
 
GMT-7 is Pacific Time in the US.

So, 0200 hours on the west coast and 0500 hours on the east coast this Sunday.
 
bcr229 said:
GMT-7 is Pacific Time in the US.

So, 0200 hours on the west coast and 0500 hours on the east coast this Sunday.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but my server guys have an office in Arizona, which I thought was Mountain Time. And to complicate matters, it appears that much of Arizona does not recognize DST. So I'm going to bed no later than 4am EST, and not worrying about what time it may be anywhere else in the world. :crazy03:
 
Well, we are on the new OS, and so far I haven't seen nor heard of any problems as a result.
 
I'm sure you already know but extremely slow and has timed out a few times today. Hopefully just a hiccup!
 
Actually I just got back in from being out of town all morning. Got some errors logged that I passed on to the server folks. Sure do wish they had been monitoring this sort of stuff themselves and reacted accordingly to the problems. The errors indicate some sort or resource allocation problem, so maybe some setting just needs to be tweaked.

According to the error log I got, problems began at 9:00am EST. Of course, that was exactly the time I hit the road to run out of town.

Oddly enough the site seemed real slow to me as soon as I logged on here, but now seems to be running fine. So not sure what happened.

So we'll see. Hopefully I won't have to roll back to the old OS. That would mean a rebuild of everything, and likely mean we would be down for a while.
 
Seems darn odd that the problems would start exactly when I left the house, and then corrected itself right when I got back. Or is that just my forcibly repressed paranoia kicking up?
 
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