The web machine uses a PHP shopping cart running atop MySQL, all of the main and important information is kept as a part of the MySQL DB. So the main thing I would want to mirror is the application and the DB. I'm a surplus dealer, so hardware isn't a big issue, I have extra servers that can be up in a couple of hours without any big layout of money. I'm just looking for the best way to keep down time to a minimum and as always to KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid. Simple to manage, simple to maintain... John Les Mikesell wrote: > John Plemons wrote: > >> I want to mirror a Centos box, not having done this before, I'm looking >> for guidance. >> >> What is the best way to perform this task, I have a running webserver, a >> single external IP address to the website, and wanted to protect myself >> should the server go down. My though would be a mirror of that >> webserver, running in background, if the main server dies, then just >> move the mirror in place, change the IP and go on... Limiting down time... >> > > There are several approaches, depending on how you want to trade expense > and effort against possible downtime - and whether your site is > approaching the point where you need a load-balanced farm of servers and > possibly redundant sites. > > The easiest plan with the least to go wrong is probably to use RAID1 > mirrored/swappable drives with a spare chassis, and also do nightly > backups. The most likely failure will be a disk drive, handled > transparently by the mirror until you can replace it. Next most likely > would be the power supply/motherboard which you handle by swapping the > disks to your spare with a small amount of downtime. Next would be an > operator or software error that erases or corrupts your disks. For that > you have to restore from your last backup with a much longer downtime. > > You can keep the spare server in sync with DRBD and fail over > automatically with heartbeat at the expense of more complexity but you > still need backups for the error scenaro. > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20090918/1d4d73d9/attachment-0005.html> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: john.vcf Type: text/x-vcard Size: 255 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20090918/1d4d73d9/attachment-0005.vcf>