On Tuesday 18 December 2007 14:39:42 Johnny Hughes wrote:
Kai Schaetzl wrote:
Frank Cox wrote on Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:55:49 -0600:
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."
But what about the data? What is a "web sevrer" or a "file server" worth without the current data?
This was to be my point exactly ... what good does a machine that can boot up into a file server with last months data or a web server with last months data be if the current server just died?
If you have a backup system in place with the ability to push certain directories onto this machine, then maybe. Otherwise, this seems fairly pointless.
A live solution with Virtual Machines and something like DRBD might work ... though the machine would by fairly heavily loaded just keeping everything updated if live for 4 other machines.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
Here is an idea. Put removable hard drive enclosures into each machine. The 4 working machines have a spare hard drive in and has a disk back up (hard drive mirror) run nightly. A working machine goes down just take out backup drive put into spare machine and go.