thoughts on setting up an emergency server

[John Covici]

Well, you might want to look at the following web page
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html because what this is a
complete live system on a bootable cd which is supposed to autodetect
hardware etc.  I have gotten it to talk, but it still needs a bit of
fixing up, but it has already saved a certain portion of my anatomy
when I couldn't boot into linux.  It uses kernel 2.4.19 with the xfs
patch.


on Sat, 26 Oct 2002 22:28:47 -0500 Gregory Nowak <greg at romuald.net.eu.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 
         John Covici
         covici at ccs.covici.com