Therese Trudeau wrote:
Explain your definition of a mission critical desktop. Does the entire
enterprise stop functioning if this desktop stops?
I am THE tech support for my company, but my desktop could die right now, and
although I would be heartbroken and a little peeved, I could just fire up my
lappy and get back to work in a few minutes. I usually have 2 desktops
running, just in case I need to put out fires while my main desktop is doing
the windows reboot dance.
If my linux machine stops functioning it's
not as bad as the windows box going off line, but it still takes a day
or two to get things back on line with the linux box with all the software I installed on it.
If the windows machine stops functioning, then yes it's a pain, it's at least two days
by the time I get back up and running because much of my work is graphic design
and that's where all my adobe stuff is loaded on, and it takes a long time
to get the OS re instlled, then grabbing my data, and re installing many many
software applications etc.
Because I am a one person company I just don't have time to spend days
getting a machine back on line, and it's happened more than once. An hour or two
however to get things runing again would not harm my work flow that much.
If you want to keep things simple, I'd recommend getting an external
drive or two and burning a copy of clonezilla-live from
http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live/. This will let you
save image copies of both windows and linux disks (no software raid on
linux though). Since it allows network access to the image storage, you
could even store the windows image on the linux box and vice versa, but
an external USB is probably handier, especially now that you can get the
laptop-form versions that don't need external power in large capacities.
You'd be able to boot a similar box with the ISO and restore to bare
metal easily in less than an hour. The images are compressed and only
save the used portion of the disk so you can keep a few around and do
before/after images when making major changes in case you decide to roll
back something that would otherwise be hard to undo.
I'd do this for the system drive and repeat the image copy only after
updates. Then I'd put all of my own work on a separate partition
(probably a software RAID1 mounted as /home on the linux box and
samba-shared to windows) and periodically rsync the contents to an
external USB/firewire drive. Depending on the value of this work, I
might have multiple external drives that I'd rotate offsite.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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