Sync'ing servers
 

Ok, here is the scenario: I have a handful of dell servers running RH9, I am looking to synchronize them in pairs, ie. a samba server syncing with a samba server, daily for backup purposes.

Unfortunately, the purchases of these servers has happened over time and all the hardware is not the same, otherwise i would just DD every nite from one to the other, or use ghost. So, I am looking for a way, and i sure it is out there in many forms, to have one server have the exact software configuration as another including users, files, configs for apache, samba, mail, and permissions but to not mirror the hardware configs. All have the same HDD size and relative capacity in terms of performance, but they have different NIC's and video cards and some are celeron and some are p4.

The end result I am looking for is to correct a problem I ran into the other day where a server went down due to a HDD quitting after only 2100hrs. While replacing the HDD and restoring linux, I had some downtime on that particular function (database server: bad for downtime) whereas with a mirrored server, I could have simply redirected that traffic to the mirror. and then reversed the syncing process. I am not looking to balance the load, and I have a fairly congested network to work on, so I need this to happen during the nite, when traffic is relatively low.

My ideal is to have one program that does this, rather than have one to mirror samba, one for web, one for mail etc. as some boxes perform multiple functions.

Thanks in advance.

I find rsync (http://rsync.samba.org/) to be very helpful, though I've never tried it for synchronzing entire computers.

I think you'll find the --exclude-from=FILE option helpful; have a file with all the hardware related configuration files and substitute it for FILE.

Lyle

I guess that I could just mirror the www directory, the homes directory, my samba config directory, my mail directory.... and not bother with the config sections at all . How about mirroring the users when they are changed on on box? I am not familiar enough with this. Thanks for the advice, and TIA