[Ubuntu] Mirroring Ubuntu

[Hightower]

I'm seriously looking into replacing our current "VLE" system with Moodle (as some of you may know with the amount of questions I've posted on Moodle recently).

I would like to know how people have set theirs up:

Do you have it mirrored across 2 servers for load balancing and fail-over?
How do you handle your backups?

[powdarrmonkey]

If I was setting it up, I'd hardware RAID0 and get some portable hard disks, and use cron, mysqldump and incremental rsyncs to back it up with.

Or maybe back up over network with rsync, ftp or ssh.

man is your friend

[webman]

Currently single server with 2 disks in RAID1 config. Backup is via database dump to a file and zip it up along with the web files and send it to a remote server.

Eventually the data will be stored on our SAN but the rest will remain the same.

[dhicks]

Do you have it mirrored across 2 servers for load balancing and fail-over? How do you handle your backups?

Our Moodle server is now (as of about last Tuesday) a virtual machine, mirrored in real time accross two servers with DRBD. No load balancing, although I'm planning on investigating that at some point. Backups will be taken using my backup script when I get a chance to install it.

--
David Hicks

[CyberNerd]

an extremely simple load balance (for the web server, not the database) is to periodically rsync the /var/www/ between two servers and just provide a round robin DNS address.
better (but a tad more complicated) method is to set up something like the redhat cluster suite, on virtualised servers.

we use a single server and backup using mysqldump and rsync , a script dumps the database then the db and files are rsynced to a backup server nightly.

[james_yale]

We use LVS and heartbeat to provide load balancing and failover for our web cluster here at Wildern. It works really well too, some faster servers in the cluster have heavier weightings so handle more of the load while some backup virtualised boxes handle 50% of the requests of the dedicated hardware.

The servers all reference a shared NFS filesystem for their webcontent (and configuration files) and connect to a central database server, so backups are taken from the NFS host and from a database replica.

[Daleus]

Our Moodle is hosted by WebAnywhere who are based in the local town.

They appear to have multiple VLE's on the server but there is no slowdown because of it. I Presume the backups are top notch as well but I have never enquired about them.

[powdarrmonkey]

They appear to have multiple VLE's on the server but there is no slowdown because of it. I Presume the backups are top notch as well but I have never enquired about them.

That's not a very safe assumption, perhaps you should ask..

[Daleus]

Well I should hope they are good, the LEA paid for all the cluster schools with this provider.

If they break, all schools lose data.