On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:48:57 +1000 (EST) "redhat@mckerrs.net" redhat@mckerrs.net wrote:
I don't understand what you are trying to achieve. Some sort of (poor mans) redundancy at the hard disk level
A spare computer that can be swapped in to replace any of 4 other computers without requiring a lot of setup between "the main machine died" and "the spare is now online."
? When would the "webserver quit" ? E.g. if your motherboard dies then it doesn't matter how many copies of an os you have spread over how many disks, the whole thing is unavailable.
That's when you whip out the spare computer, plug it into the network, boot it up and hit "1" to load the webserver, and then take the main webserver machine apart and find out why it died at your leisure. At least, that's the idea.
Why not mirror the two 300gb drives, using software raid and install the centos virtualization and run any number of vms *all the time* ?
Because the spare machine may have to replace any of 4 different computers that live on two separate networks. There is no need to have a second webserver running, for example, until the main webserver quits. If it quits, it would be nice to have another one all set up and ready to plug in. Boot up, restore the webpage data from last night's backup, and put it online. I want to have Apache set up and everything else on the spare machine before the problem arises.
Same for the fileserver, the LTSP server, and so on. One spare machine that has 4 "personalities", as required.