thoughts on setting up an emergency server

[Darrell Shandrow]

Hi Greg,

Well, first, especially if a particular system is mission-critical, it is a
very good idea to make a full system backup and keep that backup up to date.
Perhaps, do a full backup once weekly, then an incremental backup each night
thereafter.  Of course, you'll need to devise a quick method of restoring
such a full backup in the event of an emergency.

Outside of that, well, it'd be best to just have another Linux box up and
ready to go.  When the inevitable happens, just change the IP addresses on
that second box as needed, and you're all set.  Of course, your second Linux
box must be configured the same or similarly to your primary one; though it
doesn't probably have to be nearly as powerful.

OK; hope this helps.





----- Original Message -----
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg at romuald.net.eu.org>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Saturday, October 26, 2002 8:28 PM
Subject: thoughts on setting up an emergency server


> 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
>
>
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