[gentoo-user] Web server mirror

[Momesso Andrea]

I'm not a professional admin, but I run a web server that was supposed
to be a small system for a couple of users (my wife and her students),
and now became something bigger with some amount of traffic, and some
people rely on it for critical data.

Since the scope of the site changed I'd like to add some extra security.
As now all I have are dayly snapshot backup of the server hard disk on
an external disk and weekly I move one of those snapshot on a disk that
I store off site and is used only for this scope.

In the same lan I also run another machine that I use as a home server
for personal purpose.
I'd like to keep a mirror of all the webapps running on the main server
in this machine for two puroposes:

1) Have a backup working site, so that if something goes wrong, in the
time I reinstall from backup, fix hardware or wathever, I can redirect
the traffic on the salve machine (possibly in read only mode).

2) Keeping a copy of the working site on a virtual host in the other
machine allows the admin (my wife) to test new stuff, change things, add
modules, without putting in danger the main site.

What I ask is some advice on best practice to achieve the needed result;
I suppose that all I need is to rsync the webserver directory in a
virtual server on the slave machine and to dump the databases, but I'm
not sure this will be enough.

The server runs not only static content, but also a Joomla site, a
mediawiki wiki, Moodle ecc.

Any idea or suggestion from more experienced admins would be
appreciated, thanks in advance.

---
TopperH
http://topperh.blogspot.com