I've a running server, acting as webserver, mailserver, databaseserver,
ftpserver ....

I would like to have a backup-server that is updated from the mainserver in
realtime or every hour or something and can be put online very fast if the
mainserver fails.

Now I know that this is a very difficult task (integrity of data ....) and
that it might be better to implement the mirroring for each feature
seperately. This would be very difficult and expensive to implement.

So maybe there are concepts/tools that do something similar to what I want.
Dataintegrity is not the biggest deal to me, cause there are no critical
applications on the server (not the bank of england nor the nato is among
my customers and I wont mind the loose of the last 10 emails. Each
application has very fine data-cleaning-utilities (especially the
postgreSQL-database and the imap-mailserver, which are very sensible to
mixed up data)

I fear long downtimes of my server. How do the big ones deal with this ?

thnx for any idea,hint,concept ..

peter

--
peter pilsl
pilsl_usenet@goldfisch.at
http://www.goldfisch.at

"pp" == peter pilsl <pilsl_usenet@goldfisch.at>:
pp> I've a running server, acting as webserver, mailserver, databaseserver,
pp> ftpserver ....
pp>
pp> I would like to have a backup-server that is updated from the mainserver in
pp> realtime or every hour or something and can be put online very fast if the
pp> mainserver fails.

For the database server:
Use the DBMS's replication features (if any).

For the other services:
Have you tried 'rsync'-ing their data storage area ?

peter pilsl <pilsl_usenet@goldfisch.at> writes:

Are you sure that it is a good idea to run ftp and db servers on the
same box? I hope you are offering only anon ftp.

One thing you might try. I never did it, but I read somewhere that it
is possible: Have two machines. One is the live system, and the other
is the backup box. In the live server, create a mirror, and one of
the disks should be a remote disk (in the backup box) accessible
via nbd (network block device).

I have never done this. I just read about this possibility, and it
seems like a neat idea.

Vilmos