[hobbit] Backing up hobbit

[Josh Luthman]

I definitely brought up the wrong terminology, sorry about that!  I don't
need to get into man in the middle attacks or DNS changes between servers.
Hours is something I am after.  I just need to have the station back up
before the end of the day.

Your 1a suggestion is excellent, very good idea!  I'll look into that down
the road when it is more mission critical, thanks!  Your second suggestion,
while absolutely ingenious, is going to be more of a hassle to keep updated
then it will be a convenience (at least for my needs).

Over the last four hours the size of the directory went from 1023MB to
951MB.  What is going on here?!  I'm so confused =(  Is it absolutely safe
to delete the core files?  I would like to see if they continue showing up
when I'm sure that Hobbit has not been restarting.

Josh

On 10/18/07, Haertig, David F (Dave) <haertig at avaya.com> wrote:
>
>  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
>



-- 
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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