Topic: Mirroring SME 7.1 Servers

[uniqsys]

Hello everyone,

I am exploring the idea of mirroring 2 SME servers running SME 7.1.x as a fail safe backup. (If one server went down the other could be brought on line ready to go.) The hardware would have 2 -250g SATA's each.  I have searched the forums and found an entry where someone was working on a contrib to have truly seamless mirroring of servers -ie 2 servers with load balancing seen as one server to the user but it was on an older version of SME back in 2005 and I don't need it quite that sophisticated, -a manual roll-over would do.   I suspect rsync is the answer to accomplish this but am not sure.  Has anyone tried this with SME 7.1?  Any caveats?

Thanks.

[Gaston94]

Hi,
I formerly set up some kind of this feature, this was a kick and dirty install but the key points were :
 - have LAT on both server to recreate the user DB
 - usage of rsync for duplicating the /home/e-smith/files directories tree and of a mysql dump and all the files which are being under the standard SME backup tools (thinking about the required events).

I was performing manually the sytem updates on both system, so I did not care about the "system" part.
It has been working with SME7.0

By the time one french people has hardly work on DRBD and Heartbeat on a SME7 environnement. If you are not against french language you might have a look at http://www.networkontrol.net/systemes/sme_server/haute-disponibilite.html
But unless he managed to have a working setting, the referenced how-to is morelikely only a starting point and cannot be applied "as it" (without large test and correct understanding of the used mechanisms) to a production server.

Should someone else has worked on this point we might try to share experiences. I will contact the author to manage some translation.

Gaston

[brentonv]

well perhaps i could translate this for you misure.. just joking. although we can ask google to do it for us: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.networkontrol.net/systemes/sme_server/haute-disponibilite.html . if anyone gets this concept up and running, please create some simple scripts for the rest of us.

regards,
brenton

[boblefou]

Hi everyone,

I am register on the foum especially to be able to divide with you this howto on which I worked already much, because I am the author of this howto. That made already a moment that I hesitate to post over contribs my Howto and well, it is done thanks to Gaston.

Like that was already said, this howto is to be used only on machines of test.

At the hour current, the system functions perfectly well on 2 servers of production with approximately 60 users.

The service managed by drbd and Heartbeat are as follows:
- Apache
- Samba
- Imap / Imaps
- Pop3 / Pop3s
- Qmail
- Proftpd
- MySQL
I also integrated Cyrus/Imap.

   
For all questions, I remain at your disposal .

   
I make a point of excusing me for my horrible English…and I hope all the same to be understood .

regards,

[jazbokes]

Hi boblefou,

I had previously attempted to adapt this trixbox howto to smeserver 7 but I was stuck at creating  a partition for drbd..

http://asteriskprojects.com/?page_id=4

can u assist..

Thanks

Jon..

[uniqsys]

Gaston, Merci Beaucoup!

Je n'ai rien contre la langue francaise.  Mais je ne la parle pas bien et je la lis un peu. Je l'ecrire execrable!  Votre anglais, c'est bien.

I have read the posting and understood a little.  I will try again and try a translated page. I can't quite see how the servers can be used as a gateway if the 2nd NIC is used for Heartbeat.  But I could be missing something in the translation.

I think this is important enough to pursue and get a contrib going.

[uniqsys]

Hi everyone,

I am register on the foum especially to be able to divide with you this howto on which I worked already much, because I am the author of this howto.

Merci beaucoup boblefou

For all questions, I remain at your disposal .

Thanks we will need it.

I make a point of excusing me for my horrible English…and I hope all the same to be understood .

We do and you have.  I will read the translated page and try to get it going on my test servers.  You probably will be hearing from me.  Thanks, Uniqsys

[brentonv]

google translates "server" into "waiter". i find that funny . otherwise it seems to work very well. good luck guys. can't wait for a contrib. regards, brentonv

[boblefou]

Hi all,

Just a small fast word to announce to you that I have just published on my website a translation of the article (Thank you very much Gaston).

   
Page-setting is not finished yet but the article is readable.

I go tried to quickly update it according to the new functions that I added there.

   
In short, the article is here :
http://www.networkontrol.net/systemes/sme_server/en_high_availability_en.html

Do not hesitate to ask me questions, I remain at your disposal.
Good reading.