[hobbit] Backing up hobbit

[Iain Conochie]

Josh Luthman wrote:
> Stef,
>
> Thanks for the suggestions!  I'll keep these in mind when it comes 
> time to creating my backups.
>
> For now I deleted the core* files and within a few minutes the 
> server/bin dir started filling up with the core* files.  I looked at 
> history.log and I see 25165 lines that look like:
>
> 2007-10-18 17:39:05 Cannot open the all-events file '/home/user/data/hist/allevents'
> 2007-10-18 17:39:05 Worker process died with exit code 139, terminating
>   
> The log is filled with this pair of lines, over and over (though I 
> don't know why the number of lines is odd).  What should this 
> allevents file contain?

This file contains a list of all event changes, i.e. when a test changes 
colour. It is the basic history file.

Is it writable by your hobbit user?

Iain

>
> Josh
>
> On 10/19/07, *Stef Coene* <stef.coene at docum.org 
> <mailto:stef.coene at docum.org>> wrote:
>
>     On Thursday 18 October 2007, Josh Luthman wrote:
>     > I've only had Hobbit running since last Monday.  I have
>     restarted it twice
>     > to ensure that my configurations would take place (things like
>     changing the
>     > WWW hostname).  I last restarted it yesterday and it has been
>     running since
>     > yesterday, so I know if it is restarting it takes more then a
>     day.  I have
>     > 40787 total core* files in ~/server and 569364 total core* files in
>     > ~/server/bin - couldn't possibly have restarted that many times!
>     Look at the timestamps of these files.  Each crash can create a
>     core file.  So
>     each visit to the hobbit site, every poll hobbit does, every rrd
>     update can
>     create a crash and a core file.  I never had a crash/core file,
>     but in theory
>     it can.
>     We also use vmware so if a hobbit server goes down, I copy the
>     vmware guest
>     that I use to deploy new installations, copy over the etc
>     directory, goes to
>     the custumer, pick a computer/desktop/laptop/server, install
>     vmware player
>     and hobbit is running again.
>
>     > Stef - If you have two Hobbit servers and duplicate your
>     actions, why do
>     > you note your actions?  My original plan was to tar the home
>     directory of
>     > the hobbit user, but as
>     I don't have 2 hobbit servers, but more then 20 located for our
>     customers.
>     The bare mimal I need for re-creating the same setup is the
>     contents of etc
>     and some extra information I collected during the installation
>     (hostname,
>     network settings, ...).
>
>     > "Hobbit User" - I could use rsync and it would make backups though I
>     > normally don't use rsync as I like to have daily backups, in
>     case I make a
>     > mistake on Monday, the backup is done Tuesday and I catch it on
>     Wednesday -
>     > I can revert to Sunday with daily backups.  Rsync could have
>     backed up my
>     > problem making it useless in this scenario!  I have a scripts
>     that backup
>     > necessary components (like databases) and then finally tar with
>     gzip
>     > compression and then SCP the file to a remote data center (I
>     also use
>     > public keys to automate this).  I have found this works very
>     well in my
>     > situation and has saved my life in the case of a MySQL database
>     crash!
>     You don't have to rsync everything in the same way.  If you look
>     at the hobbit
>     server data, the stuff in the data directory takes op 99% of the
>     disk space.
>     And that stuff can be rsync'd and overwritten daily.  For the server
>     installation, you can also use rsync but do something like this:
>     rsync -Auhv --delete ~hobbit/server/
>     <remote>:/backup/hobbit/server-`date +%a`
>     So every day of the week you will have a new directory so you have
>     a history
>     of 7 days.
>
>     > Would it be safe for me to delete these core files and start
>     working on
>     > this task from this day forward?  What can I use to read these
>     core files?
>     > I noticed they're not text files so I assume there is some bb
>     utility to
>     > read them.  With the exception of these core* files, I would
>     expect Hobbit
>     > to peak at 200MB which I could do in a ~3 minutes
>     You can delete the core files, but you should also try to find out
>     why the are
>     created.  If you use rsync, you can exclude these core files from
>     being
>     rsync'd
>
>
>     Stef
>
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>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Josh Luthman
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>
> Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
> --- Henry Spencer