Topic: Using rsync to configure hot standby

[cabletastic]

Greetings all,
Am just dipping my toes into the smeserver waters having found a link to it thru nuxified.org. Previously I set boxes up with manual configs of Samba, kolab (with Horde), clamav and spamassasin - sme looks to be all these things but quicker to setup!
What I usually do is to have SERVER A setup as described herein as primary and then setup a spare box as SERVER B and have all of the contents of users /home drives and the /data smb shares rsynced to SERVER B so if SERVER A fails I can swap them over.
Is there any way that anyone has experience of to rsync the whole shooting match from SERVER A to SERVER B so that it becomes a proper 'hot standby' (almost like a manually controlled failover cluster) with user credentials and LDAP/DOMAIN settings intact? This could really help me here - SERVER A is backed up to SERVER B - I then usually have an ssh tunnel to rsync salient data across the web to a remote drive so we have an offsite backup. If I could take it this one stage further such that the servers 'image' themselves entirely i would be a very happy camper indeed.
Any replies really appreciated.
Cheers
Si

[janet]

cabletastic

Not quite a hot standby, but the closest thing to it without creating a lot of work for yourself, and virtually just as effective in my opinion.

http://wiki.contribs.org/Affa

You run the affa-rise command to bring the backup server up to live server status, usually quite quickly ie 10 -15 minutes or so.

[cabletastic]

Thanks a lot for the reply - I'll take a peek now!

[cabletastic]

Looks absolutely perfect for my needs - all this 'doing things manually' is gonna be history for me soon! Have spent years configuring *NIX boxes by hand for small business - no need any more!
Thanks a million again.
Cheers
Si

[Normando]

Yes cabletastic, affa is superb. Say thanks to Michael Weinberger