For everyone who has suggested RAID:
I like RAID, it's very cool. However, the kind of things are servers currently do are
not "worthy" of the price. What's valuable here, is not what it does, but the long
hours we've spent setting up.
Also, while RAID and mirroring are great for hard drive failer, it does helps not a
whit if you're cracked.
So even if we had RIAD, we want to be prepared for the worst.
As a good friend of mine says:
"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. And if it's worth doing right,
it's worth saving. And if it's worth saving, it's worth backing up"
:-)
JW
At 10:36 AM 12/15/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Jonathan Wilson wrote:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> Now that we've spent a good deal of time setting up our system of servers, it's
>occurred to us that we should be dome something more rigorous then once a week manual
>"cp -a /etc /backup/$DATE"
>>
>[snip]
>>
>> 8. It needs to have some sort of failover/failproof -ness. Something like it emails
>2 other servers whenever the job is complete. Something should run on the other
>servers that checks for that email every night. If they don't receive the email they
>can email the admins and/or page their beepers.
>>
>> 9. (kind of a repeat) We MUST be able to do a quick restore of a whole drive in
>case of emergency. I've never had to restore a whole drive before, but I've been
>around people that /thought/ they had a back up system going well, and after a disk
>failure, they found out the hard way that they didn't really have a way to restore a
>whole drive. That's no good. What's the best solution - some sort of drive image we
>can dd back onto the drive? That would take a LOT of space. The idea here is we need
>a total restore - we don't have time to reinstall Linux form our distro CD then
>manually copy the files we need out of our backups.
>>
>>
>> Any and all advise is very much appreciated. I'd really like to hear from people
>who have working backup systems.
>>
>> Is there anything I forgot, or does anyone see something wrong with anything I said?
>>
>Well, I don't have any magic bullet for you, but I would suggest that
>you set up your "critical" boxes (the ones that you won't have time
>to reinstall from scratch) using a RAID system, so that if one drive
>fails, you can just slap a new one in and rebuild the raid. If you
>were to do something like a mirrored raid system (two identical raid
>systems) the chances of having EVERYTHING blow up are negligible.
>Granted this would be expensive (talking say 6 - 10 disks per
>machine...) but it would be nearly foolproof. If you include backups
>on CD of your data directories (customer data, source code, etc) on a
>regular basis, you should be protected against just about anything
>short of an A-bomb! :-)
>Just a few ideas for you to consider...
> John
>
>
>
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----------------------------------------
Jonathan Wilson
System Administrator
Cedar Creek Software
http://www.cedarcreeksoftware.com
Central Texas IT
http://www.centraltexasit.com
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