Hi all.

This is all for a non profit group.

We would like to set up a web site. If this site goes down for any reason we would like a mirror of this site to be avaiable at the same address. The servers would be on different ISP's and run by different people. Is it possible to make this work with O/S software.

The sites would be database driven so the DB's would need to be synced every now and again. It would not need to be instant. Every hour or may be every 12 or 24 hrs even. Traffic would not be huge.

The mirror site should be avaiable within a minute or two of the old site going down preferable with no user intervention

How could this be done.
Would DNS records have to be updated. If not, what would be the best method of redirecting traffic to a new server.

I am currently running Ubuntu but the other servers could be any other flavor of Linux.

If you need any more info please let me know.

Thanks

Rob

Any flavor of Linux could easily be used. And it sounds like just enabling DRDB and HA/heartbeat is all you need.

DRDB would let you have a filesystem 'mirrored' between two systems, over a network link. A dedicated NIC just for that is not only cheap, but easily done. Then, your web pages and database could be on the mirrored partition. No need to synchronize data, since it's ALWAYS in sync. Then set up heartbeat, to monitor your primary system. If it goes down, it'll fire off scripts to bring up Apache on the other server, and modify the IP address (if needed).

Currently I am running various web sites from a vps provided by my ISP so I have no control over the 'hardware' avaiable. I have set up apache to provide the sites hosted.

I'm just really in the planning stages and am trying to work out if this is possible. My DNS records are held by the ISP.
I think it should be fairly easy to mirror a database. I assume this is done regularly. I only need one of the sites mirrored. The rest are my personal sites and if they go down, thats my hard luck. So its just one site I need to mirror and one domain I need to be avaiable.

I suspect we may end up using MediaWiki for the site. It may be another O/S wiki. I would need to mirror the DB tables just from that site and may be other data such as photo's. Not sure if I have access to DNS records from scripts. Will have to check that out with my ISP.

Does this sound like it could be set up with no access to hardware. (Infact with no hardware. Its a VPS so its all software really.)

Thanks

Rob