[gentoo-user] Re: Web server mirror

[Nikos Chantziaras]

Momesso Andrea wrote:
> 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).

Put them both behind a NAT.  When one goes down, you NAT the port to the 
other machine.


> 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.

rsync the main machine to the second machine.  You can rsync specific 
folders.  If your website is in /var/www of the first machine, you can 
rsync that to the /var/www of the second for example.


> 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.

rsync does the mirroring, NAT does the redirection of traffic.  Those 
are the tools used by most to achieve what you described.