That's another option to which I agree about having a redundant system such as server co-location. Covenant Data Systems, Inc also provides that as well. Please check them out at http://www.covenantdata.com Robert Williams Programmer / Web Developer / Network Administrator Covenant Data Systems, Inc. http://www.covenantdata.com rwilliams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -----Original Message----- From: redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jay LaPrade Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2005 12:51 PM To: redhat-list@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Image/backup This question is so basic, yet so complicated to answer. The first question is, is "How critical is this system?" Think about it. What if your Internet connection goes down? What if you have a redundant Internet connection and the city looses power? Happens in Southern CA. could happen in your town/city. So the first thought is should you have a redundant system somewhere in case your location went down? What about a natural disaster? To answer this, if you need that kind of reliability, I would suggest planning something out with a 24/7 Webhosting company that guarentees uptime and redundant power. A small colo cabinet should be enough for your needs. Although, even then, I would have a redundant backup system at your business location. I would also recommend that the colocation facility be in another state. For even more complicated and complete solutions, Akamai offers more http://www.akamai.com/en/html/services/enhanced_dns.html I like the cluster idea, but I do not believe it necessary. A Cluster is more for a high performance environment. It will allow you more performance, but for the time and the upkeep, it's just frustrating to administrate. I would advise using something like a high availablity server: http://linux-ha.org/ I have used heartbeat in a number of environments. In a Heartbeat environment you have two servers. One is the primary and Two is the backup. If for some reason One fails, then Two assumes the ip and services of One. in essence it becomes One. It does this by mirroring the content on One, then in the event of a failure, which it checks for, it takes over. Your solution is weak. If the raid controller dies on this server. Your down. If the power supply dies (and redundant power supplies do fail) then your down. If any number of hardware issues occur, you are down. In regards to Disaster Recovery. Providing that you have something like heartbeat running, in the advent of a disaster, you will want something that can get your primary server back online as soon as possible. I would recommend buying 3 servers that have exactly the same hardware. Should One or Two go down, you could always bring up the third or use parts from the third. I would recommend having a default image of the OS stored somewhere with all the basic software configured. Possibly on a fileserver or tape. Tape will be slower to restore from. But, the image will need to be maintained, and of course you will need a backup system for the dynamic data. Whether it be database or web site. In either case you should be able to have weekly, and daily backups of that data for at least 2 weeks if not more. There are a number of commercial and open source products available to meet your needs there. My last bit of advice is, Test. Test. Test. Test your backup disaster solution. Test it monthly. If you can't find the time to test monthly, hire someone to assist. It is absolutelty critical that you are prepared. Just like the fire alarm tests, we all had in grade school, you need to be able to get your system back in the advent of a real disaster. That's all I have. There are a number of good books on the subject or disaster recovery, I suggest that you think about reading one or two of them. Jay We currently have a Redhat machine that is a 24/7 machine and We currently have a Redhat machine that is a 24/7 machine and is critical to our company. We want to be able to get the machine back to its current state if it where to blow up or something else extreme should happen. Basically we want to be able put two new disks in the machine in question in the event of a problem and be up a running within minutes. The current two disks are Hardware mirrored so we would need the same info/data/config on two new disks and then they can sit in our safe incase of a emergency. One other thing to add is that ideally we do not want to have any downtime on the server as i said before it is used 24/7. Could anyone please advise in detail on how we might achieve this? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! 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