Re: [gentoo-user] Best website backup practice

[kashani]

Mick wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 December 2008, kashani wrote:
>> Momesso Andrea wrote:
>
>>> So there is no way if I want to keep the databases runnung?
>> 	If your database isn't terribly busy I'd setup a second Mysql instance
>> on the same machines and make it a slave of your primary. Then when it's
>> time to backup you can stop the slave and make a backup without
>> disturbing the master instance.
>
> Aha! Never done this.  How would you go about it?

To be honest I've never attempted it. Most of my recent installations 
have been large enough where having an actual backup server was a 
requirement. However Gentoo does include the /etc/init.d/mysqlmanager 
startup script. You'd need to muddle through it and figure out how to 
separate the pid files, suffixes, conf file enough to make it work.

When finished you'd want you slave instance running only on localhost 
and say port 4306. Then you tell it your master is localhost port 3306. 
Mysql likes to assume localhost is always a socket so you might want to 
add an entry into /etc/hosts to trick it into connecting via tcp, but 
I'm not sure if it matters.

something like
127.0.0.1 localhost mastermysql.yourdomain.com

Additionally be careful with the conf setting in your Mysql 
installation. I think the standard Gentoo conf uses 64MB of RAM. If 
you've modified your production copy make sure you keep the slave copy 
small. You might need to raise the keybuffer in your slave if you have 
large indexes. I suspect you can ignore most of this in a web 
application environment, but it's good stuff to keep in mind later on.

	I'm moving this week and with the holidays I've got no time to try it, 
but if you have question after the first I'd be happy to help you sort 
it out.

kashani