Potential down time coming
 

I just got an email notice automatically generated by my server:
I have submitted a ticket to the server people, but best I can figure, looks like there is a potential hard drive failure imminent in the server.

Not sure how much of a problem this is going to be and when, but if it indicates a failing hard drive, then I suppose the server guys will be replacing the offending drive sometime sooner rather than later.

Not sure how much, if any, warning I will get as to either the drive replacement, or an actual failure.

So if the site is down sometime soon, those of you who read this will have a heads up as to why.

BTW, I am generating backups of all the sites on the server right now, so expect some substantial slowdowns for a while today.

Thanks for the heads-up, Rich!

Well, apparently a false alarm.
But I am doing backups anyway. Just in case.

Good, because if you have backups chances are you won't need them.

Actually, backups kind of scare me. It is the kind of thing that you never know whether you have a good backup until you REALLY need it. And by then, if the backup is not good, it is too late to do anything about it. Testing a backup for a server would mean leasing another server for that purpose. I probably should do it, but likely I never will.

The backup file for FaunaClassifieds creates a 254gb compressed file. I create one of these roughly every month. Then nightly I backup all MySQL databases. I store copies on my desktop PC and also copy them to a NAS here.

But are they GOOD backups? Beats me. I won't know until I am forced into a do or die situation. The backup either works or it is the end of the road for my internet sites.

I am pretty sure my programmer has a copy of all my vBulletin sites, but he lives in Turkey and I haven't heard anything from him since that big earthquake over there. Hopefully he is OK, but apparently a lot of people over there didn't fare very well.

Just seems like a lot of BAD things happening lately, of which, a server failure doesn't really rate very high on the list of things to lose sleep over. I am just riding the surf board as long as the wave holds me up, I suppose.

Would this be why the home page hasn’t refreshed since the 23rd and no one can upload pictures on the classifieds?

Probably not.

To elaborate.......... :D

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As for the photo upload problem, I have contacted my server guys and my programmer to take a look at the problem. I suspect at update of the server OS code has caused this problem. There was an update done recently that caused some odd error messages to appear to me via email, so things like that always seem to be just the tip of the iceberg.

So, they are looking into it. ETA of a fix is unknown at this point.