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<font size="2"><font size="3">Hello all,
<br />
<br /> I know this has been discussed before, but I am still trying to "sell" the whole DRBD/Heartbeat system to the higher-ups within my company and I can't find a solid answer on this here in the mailing list. So I will ask again.
<br />
<br />I NEED to have tape backups - we are in the medical software business and having a tape to fall back on is crucial to our business model (if a client's office burns to the ground and both the primary and secondary servers in the 2-node cluster are gone for good, then a tape backup no more than a day old stored offsite is the only solution left - no doctor will tolerate losing much more data than this).
<br />
<br />So let's forget the whole mounting secondary as read-only mess for now. What I am thinking is this:
<br />
<br /> -at backup time (2AM?):
<br /> -stop drbd and heartbeat on the secondary
<br /> -bring down the dedicated eth1 connection to the primary (leaving eth0 still up so I can get in if need be)
<br /> -mount the sda4 partition (NOT the drbd0 device as drbd will be stopped) to it's normal position
<br /> -run my usual tape backup routine
<br /> -unmount sda4 again
<br /> -bring eth1 back up
<br /> -start drbd and heartbeat again
<br />
<br />I am thinking that in this way my users will still see NO downtime of the primary resource (unless of course there is a hardware failure during the tape backup while the secondary is offline!), and I still get a tape backup that is quite current. Once the secondary comes back up again anything that may have changed during the backup will replicate leaving me with only a tiny window of time to be without the secondary (an hour or two tops for my tape backup to run).
<br />
<br />Could it really be this simple? We don't use lvm at all, just plain old ext3 file systems, so I believe this negates the whole lvm snapshot and then back that up dicussion I have seen here in the lists. What are your thoughts? Currently we implement what we call a view-only backup server at some clients where a second server is up and running and sync'ed (using rsync) only once a night from the main, then a tape backup runs once the sync is done. In this way our aplpication is only offiline during the time it takes to complete the rsync. I am thinking that there is no need to do this at all if I have a DRBD/Heartbeat 2 node cluster. (I certainly don't need a 3rd machine and keep doing the rsync then tape like we do now do I??)
<br />
<br />Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this you can share!
<br />
<br />-Ken
<br />
<br />
<br /></font>
<br />
<br />Kenneth M
DeChick
<br />Linux Systems
Administrator
<br />Community Computer Service,
Inc.
<br />(315)-255-1751
ext154
<br />http://www.medent.com
<br />kend@medent.com
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