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<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>If you want recovery within minutes you probably won't get
by with a backup/restore scenerio. Hours possibly, but not minutes.
You of course still need to backup things even if you choose one of the
suggestions below.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>(1)</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>If you have a second server, clone your current Hobbit
server to it and keep it up to date regularly with rsync.
Simplest, but not necessarily the best, would be a manual failover where you
start up all processes manually. You would need to handle the move of the
webserver. You could twiddle with DNS for that, but I've never seen that
work well. You have DNS propogation delays and you have Windows clients
that try to "help" you by caching previous DNS lookups. I would instead
recommend an IP takeover using ARP poisoning ("poisoning" sounds bad, so maybe
that's not the best word to use for this, but it's the same technique used
by those on The Dark Side). A decent short description of this is: <A
href="http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/04/03/linuxhacks.html">http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/04/03/linuxhacks.html</A></FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>(1a)</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>It would be fairly simple just leave Hobbit running 100%,
and also the webserver, on both machines. The secondary machine could have
a blank hobbit-alerts.cfg file that gets overwritten with the real file upon
failover (so you won't get duplicate notifications). All Hobbit clients
should be configured to send all data to both servers all the
time.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>(2)</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>If you don't have two machines to work with and you still
want speedy recoveries, I'd look into making a portable Hobbit bootable
CD. Start with Knoppix, Slax, or one of the other Linux LiveCDs and modify
it to include your Hobbit installation on the CD. At least in theory, you
could then hijack some poor coworker's PC, boot it with your Hobbit/Linux
LiveCD, and have a functional Hobbit. You wouldn't have your history
available but that's probably acceptable during a quick recovery
scenerio. You would also need to update that LiveCD whenever you make
significant changes to Hobbit. You could do the same IP takeover as above
with ARP poisoning to make it semi-tranparent. Running off the LiveCD
would be the short term quick fix ... after getting that up and running you'd
quickly move your efforts to recovering your real Hobbit server from the backups
that you had.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=465320822-18102007><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff size=2>I have not implemented the above myself. I am just
starting to look into that. The above are some ideas that I'm considering
implementing myself.</FONT></SPAN></DIV><BR>
<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader lang=en-us dir=ltr align=left>
<HR tabIndex=-1>
<FONT face=Tahoma size=2><B>From:</B> Josh Luthman
[mailto:josh@imaginenetworksllc.com] <BR><B>Sent:</B> Thursday, October 18, 2007
2:55 PM<BR><B>To:</B> hobbit@hswn.dk<BR><B>Subject:</B> [hobbit] Backing up
hobbit<BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>I am trying to create a backup of hobbit so in case the box is
stolen, blown up, disappear, vanishes into thin air or even the boogey monster
steals it, I can recover with a secondary box in a matter of minutes - hours at
most. <BR><BR>What I had done with BB was simply backup the entire user's home
directory. I had this done every single morning. Each gzipped tar
was a mere 15 megs.<BR><BR>When I do a du -shc /home/user it reaches 1021M and
in /home/user/server/bin/ du -shc core* I see 860M. What are these core*
files? <BR><BR>Does anyone have any suggestions on what to backup? I don't
have the luxury of using tapes or another machine on the same LAN, so I am
transporting this data over the Internet. While bandwidth is not a
concern, I'd much rather not have to transport a gigabyte every morning =)
<BR><BR>Thanks in advance,<BR>Josh<BR clear=all><BR>-- <BR>Josh
Luthman<BR>Office: 937-552-2340<BR>Direct: 937-552-2343<BR>1100 Wayne
St<BR>Suite 1337<BR>Troy, OH 45373<BR><BR>Those who don't understand UNIX are
condemned to reinvent it, poorly. <BR>--- Henry Spencer </BODY></HTML>