Imaging/rebuilding strategies
 

Greetings!

I've got a couple Fedora 15 boxes. One is a Primary/Master, the other is a Failover/Slave.

I'm looking for some advice on how image them so that they can be rebuilt within 3-4 hours.

My initial thought was to take weekly LV snapshots of / and /home (/home has a few things I can't lose). I would then re-install the OS, resize the LVs, dd the snapshots over / and /home, then apply the daily gzips and mysqldumps.

I ran through this process a few times. Worked sometimes, failed other times. The symptoms of the failures include startup failure of lm_sensors, iptables, and network. It would boot up to the GUI, but no Ethernet, and oddly enough, no auto-mounting of USB devices.

Don't know why it would sporadically fail like that, I run through the exact same commands each time.

Anyway....the failures have me thinking that this might not be the solution I'm looking for.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Instead of rebuild time - you might plan for redundancy and more redundancy.

You could use about 3 systems to work your way out - something akin to clustering/san etc

One of the systems could have mirror installed - to act as data server
rest two systems can now act as primary and secondary server .


Now Primary can of course cater to clients - Where as backup server keeps backing/fetching up data from Data Server to locally drives.

In case data server goes down - you can mount backups from secondary server and so forth - all three could replace each other if need be.