[CentOS] OOT: Advice on failover rsync setup

Wed Jan 24 21:41:05 UTC 2007
Mark Schoonover <schoon at amgt.com>

John Summerfield wrote:
> Mark Schoonover wrote:
>> Benjamin Smith wrote:
>>> On Wednesday 17 January 2007 04:41, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>>>> Fajar Priyanto wrote:
>>>>> I have a task on setting up a cluster of 2 servers for providing
>>>>> ftp service. We use RH's Cluster suite. However the cluster setup
>>>>> is lack of shared network storage, so the /var/ftp/pub is mounted
>>>>> on each server. The cluster is set
>>>>> 
>>>>> So, are we on the right direction? Or is there any better way?
>>>>> Thank you very much, 
>>>>> 
>>>> have you considered using drbd ?
>>> Well, I was going to suggest using RAID1 with one of the partitions
>>> being a network block device, but this looks even better!
>>> 
>>> Rsync is great for period backups (not more than once per day or so)
>> 
>> I run rsync every hour on multi-terrabyte systems with no problems.
>> The NASes do have a private GB network to push the data through, so
>> the user network doesn't see the network traffic generated by rsync.
>> I can have anywhere from just a couple hundred megs, to 100 gigs of
>> data change inside of an hour.
> 
> OTOH I found running rsync daily over the Internet to backup a Linux
> box impractical; it used heaps of RAM (and swap) and ran for hours.
> Fortunately, its excessive use of swap (several times real RAM) didn't
> lead to thrashing.
> 

This seems rather odd performance for rsync. As I type this, I'm sending
800GB to a new server, and rsync is using 28MB of RAM. I don't think network
speed is an issue with how much RAM/SWAP is getting used by rsync. Could you
post your rsync command, I'm curious to what your running. What version of
rsync are you using??


> Now, I run a hand-crafted script that makes a compressed ISO
> (mkzftree) and I rsync that. I'm maintaining a backup filesystem of
> about 8 Mbytes remotely now; the rsync runs for a little over two
> hours daily. 

That's what I love about *NIX, more than one way to skin a cat!

Thanks!

Mark Schoonover 
IS Manager
American Geotechnical - California, Nevada and Arizona 
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