Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula, Mondo and Mindi

[Arthur E. I. <em...@ms...>]

Alan Brown <aj...@ms...> wrote:
>
> In an effort to avoid ever having to do a server rebuild, I run
> all disks other than Spool in Raid-1 and drive health checks in
> fairly paranoid mode plus keep enough spares to be able to transfer
> the drives into an identical chassis if need be. It's not proof
> against 'rm -rf /', but it should take care of any electronic
> failures.

FWIW, one of the major steps that I took as a part of my Bacula
2.0.3 "do-over" was to install the director in a virtual machine
under VMware ESX.  This makes the director completely hardware-
agnostic, and VMware provides options for taking snapshots of
running virtual servers and backing up images of the virtual
hard disks on the fly.  (Since we're virtualizing everything
else for DR purposes anyway, it seems like a no-brainer to do the
Bacula director/database virtually as well.)

I'm going to make the catalog backup job also trigger a VM
snapshot/copy/export of the director one of these days, which
will make it just about as disaster-proof as I can get it.....

-Arthur

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Arthur Emerson III                 Email:      em...@ms...
 Network Administrator              InterNIC:   AE81
 Mount Saint Mary College           MaBell:     (845) 561-0800 Ext. 3109
 330 Powell Ave.                    Fax:        (845) 562-6762
 Newburgh, NY  12550                SneakerNet: Aquinas Hall Room 6