Emergency Maintenance 5 Jun 11

[wolf_bluejay]

Originally Posted by titus

Hello,

Thanks. I've looked into a number of options and the latest on the table is to setup another box mirroring everything I have on the current box. In addition to the daily database dump which gets transferred onto another box also for safety, I'm looking into doing a local database cluster. If possible, I'll also setup a link to my home so I'll either get an asynchronous replication or if not, a scheduled dump transfer.

Just from the sites I run behind the "load balancer" -- if you are going to run two, use both. If one fails, it falls over to the other without missing a beat.
Most importantly, I can make config changes, and restart apache 1 at a time without an outage. And if the new settings break things (I check before I restart the other apache servers), I get a chance to fix it by just turning if off.

Originally Posted by titus

The cluster is the bit where I need to do some serious testing as I only know of one person using vBulletin is testing this setup.

For a lot of DB work I use mysql. The cluster setup is NOT very good. The DB needs to fit into ram, and if you have to replay the logs from the last dump. (many many hours in my case). CLusters would work if you have 5+ DB machines in separate data centres. I don't have that.


Master-Slave replication is a nice backup solution. The slave can run on much less hardware as it does not handle read-only queries. Slave are async, and can be shutdown, and just catch up when re-started. As no queries go to the slave, it can be used for other things. In my case it is where the backups run from, and is a live backup itself in my "backup" data center. It takes about 30 mins to setup a slave from an existing DB, and if you run one at home -- turn it on, let it catch up (data transfers quickly, and runs the relay-log after), turn it back off. Great solution from a home backup, as well as having backups run without slowing down the database of the live site.

Originally Posted by titus

Anyway, I just but a new PC to replace my laptop so I get some serious gear here to improve my work efficiency. Sweet stuff. Shuttle box, iCore-7 Sandy Bridge, 16GB, 10,000rpm WD Velociraptor, Radeon 6870. I'm going to setup at least 2 screens so I can see things better. Then I'll setup my two other boxes here to test the database cluster.

Sadly, I find that desktop machine no longer keep up with me As I'm a linux guy, the desktop is just a fancy display, and I ssh into everything to do work -- however I run multi-monitor (4 in one office and 2 in my other office). I will NEVER, EVER go back to working with just one. Thankfully my employer understands that a few bucks on dual displays improve the efficiency so much that it is just silly not to Especially when I'm just so gosh darn expensive.

Titus[/quote]