Rsync to mirror servers? Anyone?

motobrandt

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I'm wanting to mirror two DA servers and perhaps do some load balancing in the future but mainly I just want to have a redundant webserver for maximum uptime. I'm running FreeBSD 4.8. Which, by the way is working fabulously with DA (except for FrontPage :( )

Does anyone have any experience with something like this? I'm thinking of looking into Rsync but I haven't had the time yet.

We need (errr... I need) a How-To Rysnc FreeBSD servers. anyone? extensis?;)
 
Umm haven't used it that much but here is what I found out. You can use this command to do a simple transfer via ssh.

rsync -a ssh home/ [email protected]:/home/

I will have to work though this with you to give any help. The problem I see is 2 fold...

One dynamic content can get crossed. We have a customer with a large site on our network. He has multiple dedicated machines running a round-robin setup but he only have one database server. All the dynamic content is on that db server. If one goes not it is really not that big of a problem. If you have 2 server with just httpd and mysql how will you get the correct mysql data moved?

Lets say your rsync the /var /usr /etc directories you are bound to run into a few problems. apache, proftpd, exim configs are bounds to a specific ip address so you will end up having problems in the long run.

I know this has been discussed and I can't figure out how this could be done. rsync is normally used to backup data not make 2 identical servers.

If you run sites that are not dynamic at all EVER then you have a fighting chance to get it to work.
 
Rsync can make identical servers, but as you've noticed, it's not a cut-and-paste operation.

Yes, both servers have to answer to the same IP#s, which means only one can be online at a time. (Yes, you can do it, by internally routing certain IP#s to an ethernet interface that's not connected until you need it.)

Or you'll have to exclude certain files from the rsync, and maintain them manually.

Creating true automatic redundancy in this kind of environment (dynamically updated sites and databases) is a job best left to professionals.

Unless you really want grey hair :) .

Jeff
 
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