Backup Server

[Matthew Juszczak]

I'm not worried about down time.

I'm strictly worrying about backing up:

	/home and /usr/local/mysql/var

On server 1 and

	/home and /var/mail

On Server 2.

Thats it.

Any ideas?  Thanks!

-Matt
On Mon, 2003-12-29 at 22:48, anubis wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 03:30 am, samy lancher wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > I have a 4.5 FreeBSD server. It is our Email, web and database server. I
> > would like to setup a backup server so that when the main server goes down
> > the backup server takes over its job. Could some one please tell me the
> > best way to setup a backup server and also suggest some good documentation.
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Naveen.
> >
> >
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> 
> I have had a bit of a look into this myself and this is my take on it.  I 
> would like to hear of other people experiences too.
> 
> There are a number of things that you have to decide on first before you go 
> any further. 
> 
> These are:
> 	budget
> 	how critical the system is to downtime
> 	how much data you are willing to lose
> 	how long are you willing to wait for the second system to kick in.
> These will determine how you are going to build your system.  You will have to 
> keep the answers in mind when you are looking at any solution.
> 
> What you seem to be looking for is a failover system.  There is a fair bit 
> written about failover systems.  Googling will find you lots.  Make sure that 
> you look up linux high availability and failover as well to get a broader 
> view.  I have added some links below.
> 
> There is really 2 things that you are trying to do here.  Provide redundancy 
> for the services and redundancy for the data.  The services are a bit easier 
> and cheaper than the data.  The big problem is the data, especially 
> databases.  Due to their nature they cant easily be copied while live.  
> 
> A solution to this is a SAN.  With lots of money it is easier as you can buy 
> yourself a SAN and hook the two machines to it and host the data on the SAN.  
> With some clever scripts from those HA sites when one machine goes down the 
> other can take over and use the same data.  There are other solutions using a 
> fancy Y shaped SCSI cable to a external drive array.  Others my be able to 
> help here as I dont know about them.
> 
> The other alternative is 2 identical machines.
> When you have 2 machines with the master storing data on its local drives it 
> gets tricker.  This is where you have to decide on how much data you are 
> willing to lose.  
> 
> As an example we have a bsd box that rsyncs our windows fileserver ever hour.  
> Should windas go down we run a script on the workstations remapping our 
> drives to the bsd box.  In this case we are prepared to lose up to an hours 
> work.  We are also prepared to lose say 15-30 minutes of time mucking around.  
> 
> In your situation perhaps what you could do is upgrade to 5.1 and rsync 
> snapshots of your data to the secondary machine.  You could use the failover 
> setup as described on HA sites to fire up the services on the secondary 
> machine and take over.  This should work as snapshots are supposed to capture 
> an instant in time but I couldnt guarantee it until I tested it.  You would 
> still be losing data as you could only snapshot data and transfer it in 
> discrete intervals.
> 
> A handy thing that linux has that I dont think that freebsd has is drbd.  This 
> is a block device that can mirror data across a network.  If freebsd had this 
> it would be easy to make the second machine a true mirror of the first.  
> I wonder if they are looking at a thing similar to this in the future.
> 
> Look here for some intersting reading
> 
> http://linux-ha.org/
> http://www.drbd.org/
> http://sporner.dnsalias.org/
> http://failover.othello.ch/getting_started.html
> 
> 
> 
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