Re: [PLUG] Disaster Recovery Strategies

[sean finney <seanius@seanius.net>]

hey david,

On Thu, Sep 02, 2004 at 12:39:17PM -0400, David Richardson wrote:
> I should have mentioned, the down time is not the issue.  It doesn't 
> matter if the machine is down for weeks.  I just don't want to have to 
> spend more time than is absolutely required to bring the machine back up.

what distribution of linux are you using?  some distributions have
special tools that can do this (redhat/fedora: kickstart, debian: fai,
solaris: jumpstart), and then there are more generic tools like
systemimager (which is effectively a really big rsync)

myself, i haven't collected critical mass to get fai going for my debian
machines (the learning curve is pretty steep, and lots of initial setup
time), but instead keep important directories (mostly /etc, and
/usr/local) rsync'd on another machine.  combining this with a regularly
updated list of packages and an fhs-compliant distribution makes a
from-scratch reinstall not so painful.


	sean

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