• 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....

Potential down time coming

WebSlave

WebSlave

It is what it is, but certainly not what it was.
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I just got an email notice automatically generated by my server:
Device: /dev/sda, SMART Failure: FAILURE PREDICTION THRESHOLD EXCEEDED: ascq=0xf8
Click to expand...

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.
 
Well, apparently a false alarm.
We have already checked the drives in your server earlier today when we received the same alert and we see no indication of pending failure. Please note that the /dev/sda device indicated in the email is a RAID array and therefore it is not actually capable of SMART diagnostics.
Click to expand...

But I am doing backups anyway. Just in case.
 
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?
 
To elaborate.......... :D

To mark all threads as being read: Quick Links -> Mark Forums Read

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.
 
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