thoughts on setting up an emergency server

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi all.

I've been thinking of the possibility of a dark day when some piece of hardware should fail in my server, leaving it inoperable, and me up a creek without a paddle.

I usually wouldn't have the time to setup another box to temporarily replace the failed one. Instead, I'd like to have things already set, so that I can make some minor tweaks if need be, and let a replacement run.

I do have one more box with gnu/linux that I can configure as a server just in case.
However, doing so would mean that I would need to keep in mind that it should be a backup server any minute, and that I can't mess around with it like I could otherwise.

What came into my head is to put zipslack/speak on a 250 meg zip disk. Then, should something go wrong with the main box, I can hook up my parallel zip drive into another box, and let it run until I was able to get the main box back online without being under pressure.

I would strip zipslack to the minimum needed to run web, dns, and mail.

The advantage would of course be that it would all be ready to go.
The disadvantage would be the 250 meg limit.

I was wondering if those of you who run your own domains have prepared for the dark day I described.

If so, I would appreciate it if you could please share your plan b for my brain to chew on and/or resynthesize to meet my needs.

Some people may just ask why don't I take a couple of hours, install slackware on some other partition some where, and I'd be ready to go.

It wouldn't be that simple, since I'd need to build software such as qmail from sources, and I have also pretty heavily modified my current slackware server's startup scripts to meet my specific needs.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
Greg