On Tue, 2005-05-31 at 23:01, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote: > I already have backups on the MX and web servers, however those do > me no good when the main users server goes down. THAT's the one I need > to figure out how to build a redundant setup for. Users can't get to > their accounts/files/e-mail if that main server goes down. I don't know > if there's any way of building some kind of quiet failover system that > would allow users to continue using their shell and get to their files > and e-mail when one server goes down (and the other takes up the > slack.) Somehow when the main server comes back up some things would > have to switch back and all of that. You'll find some projects here: http://www.linux-ha.org/ about doing real-time redundancy. My opinion is that for most things the additional complexity is about as likely to cause failure as to avoid it, expecially for a multipurpose server. A simple-minded approach is to use servers with swappable drive carriers, mirror all the partitions, and keep a spare server around. The most likely failure would be a disk drive and RAID1 lets you continue without even a slowdown. If you have hot swap drives you can replace and rebuild without stopping too. In the less likely event of a motherboard component failure you can pull the drives, move to your spare box, reboot and be back with minimal downtime. That's not particularly elegant but it's pretty foolproof and simple enough that you can talk someone else through doing it over the phone. You do still need backups to cover the case where a software or operator error destroys the data on the live disks. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
