Full server mirror

Hello,

I have 2 almost identical servers. (Almost in that 1 has a little less ram and proc speed) But chipsets, harddisk everything is the same.

Now i was wondering if i could just mirror 1 of those servers to the other one.

So that i got 2 identical system. So i would love to have them sync all changes between master to slave, on lets say 3 AM.

So when ever the main fails you have a system ready to go as backup.

Is this possible? I've seen warsync and that comes close, but is there something specially made for that?

Thanks in advance,
ColdDoT

 

You're talking about something like clustering or failover?
Well let's see: You need to change the IPs whenever one node fails. So you have at least a downtime of about one day... so, your idea is great but no yet "mature"

 

I do not care much about the switching of dns, and i do know the caching is long. (easy work around, just give everything an extra dns subdomain)

But mainly i just want a full backup for easy replacement if my server would die. That i just could get my car and drive to the datacenter to replace it.

I currently i'm rsync(ing) all important data to servers spread across my country. And i just want a full replacement server ready to if my main server would die.

 

I'd use rsync (see http://www.howtoforge.com/mirroring_with_rsync ) and MySQL replication for your databases (see http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-se...plication-with-ssl-encryption-on-debian-lenny ).

 

I do that to, using your guides for, a long time already.

But i was just wondering about keeping all installed packages in sync. Hell even almost all config files the same.

So if could do a quick full server switch if it ever would happend.

Or is there just no simple way, and you have to do a lot manual?

 

Another possibility is to use shared storage, i.e. some kind of storage that is used by both systems (e.g. SAN/NAS, iSCSI, etc.). That way both systems would always use the same data.

 

Mmm, that indeed would be good, but they are not physically together. They are a long way from eachother and the only connection is the internet.

 

You can use shared storage over the network (e.g. iSCSI).

 

Ooo sounds very interessting, thanks once again falko.