[hobbit] Backing up hobbit

[Haertig, David F (Dave)]

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.
 
(1)
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:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/04/03/linuxhacks.html
 
(1a)
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.
 
(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.
 
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.

________________________________

From: Josh Luthman [mailto:josh at imaginenetworksllc.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 2:55 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: [hobbit] Backing up hobbit


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. 

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.

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? 

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
=) 

Thanks in advance,
Josh

-- 
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373

Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. 
--- Henry Spencer 
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