I'm putting together a disaster recovery plan and I'm trying to come up with a quick way to get new machines in place in case of catastrophic hardware failure, e.g. two servers go down at the same time (this is an HA setup and must always remain fault tolerant). At this point I'm trying to find someone who would rent a server to me, allowing me to take physical possession of it.
Why do I need physical possession of it? The problem is that I use IP-based storage on a private network and therefore can't rely on a rented server in another cabinet, even across the aisle in the same datacenter, without adding significant complexity to my setup.
So my question, in summary, is this: What would be the fastest, cheapest and simplest way to get a new server in my cabinet in a few short hours?
My servers are going to be in Colo4Dallas, so if there's a provider there who specializes in this or has made an arrangement with you or someone you know in the past, please let me know about them. If you can think of a better way to do things (the obvious solution of investing in more servers excluded),
I am not familiar with quick backup methods, but let me give you an example which might help you provide me with the best possible information.
1. I currently run a hosting business.
2. cPanel accounts are backedup nightly.
Question: I am worried something may happen to the server (DoS Attack) or just an internal error - what would be the quickest way to have your entire webserver back online?
I was thinking another HD with the same installation/configuration.
What procedures have other hosting organizations taken to prevent there web server from loosing downtime.
I'm used to operating dedicated servers. This year I want to venture into getting a reseller account and / or media temple account.
With my dedicated servers, I do automated mysql dumps and I do nightly rsyncs of all my /home /etc and other important data so disaster recovery is possible.
My question is, how do you do the same thing? Sleep well at night? with these regular web hosting accounts?
I see most newbie people who pay for web hosting do not bother to backup their data. Ignorance is bliss until disaster strikes.
How do you automatically backup your data (mysql and directories) in your multiple web hosting accounts like reseller or grid service media temple?
I'm trying to find a good hosting provider to host our company's website as our fallback option in case of disaster. One or two dedicated servers should do it, but it'll need the space/bandwidth to host a database of around 60-80 gigs, with the ability to rsync newer copies of the database on a regular basis. We also need to store a Tomcat website, which will take up much less space, but also need to be rsynced to be kept up to date on a regular basis, though less often than
Also, we probably need Red Hat Linux specifically, as opposed to other flavors of Linux.
Of course we need root access to install the other apps we'll need. My paramount concern is the security of our companies data, much of which not only has to be protected for our companies sake, but also for laws such as HIPAA, etc. Cost is a consideration, but security, dependability, and flexibility (root access to our machine, ability to rsync between sites) is more important.
I was wondering if anyone's got suggestions for me, hosting providers they've liked for these purposes? I'm looking at Media Temple's dpv Nitro option right now ...
There is so much information on disaster recovery and backing up one's server, that I'm getting glassy-eyed trying to take it in. Maybe if I became an actual case study, and get some "group think" help, this thread could benefit many others in a similar situation.
Current Situation:
1. I'm a small hosting company, 5 years in existence, with about 350 clients. www.mlhi.net
2. Dedicated Linux server, PLESK CP w/unlimited domains license, fully managed at HostNexus (great guys). It does not have a RAID array (used to have that at Rackspace) but it does have a backup drive that everything is backed up to with a cron job every night.
3) In addition I have a Linux Sys Admin on retainer, www.linuxbox.co.uk (he is better than excellent). Two years of excellent server maintenance and security on top of the managed service I get at HostNexus.
4) I just bought a VPS plan at JauguarPC.com after much research (a lot of it here at WHT) and as they say "so far so good" with the ease of dealing with them. I have not setup anything there yet- just got the VPS provisioned a few days ago.
Fears and Concerns:
1. Data center destroyed/ my server burns up (including backup drive) etc etc.
2. DDOS attack (which did hit this data center a few months ago and I was down for hours)
3. If I had to FTP everything back to another server from my local, at 18 GB, it's not too cool.
Want to do this:
1. I want my Sys Admin to run a backup copy (and incrementals every night) to an identically configured VPS server at JaguarPC. Both servers are now running identical PLESK 8.4.
2. I want the fastest recovery possible without spending a ton of money. I know this means I don't get an "instant" recovery, but recovery within 24 hours is more than OK. None of my customers are ecommerce... just brochureware sites.
My "I'm not an expert" plan:
1. If primary server goes bye-bye forever, I can login to my BulkRegister/Enom account and change the child nameserver IPs to the IP's of the VPS. In 24 hours or less, every request for the nameservers would then be routed to the new server.
2. I can create an A record on every domain like www2.johndoeinsurance.com that would point to the IP at the VPS, so I can ease my mind anytime I want to make sure everything is safe and sound on the second server, and ready to go in an emergency.
How do I configure the DNS?
I control dns at Enom for about two-thirds of my customers. I have ALL domains pointed to ns.mlhi.net and ns2.mlhi.net. Here are my options??
1. I create two more child nameservers... ns3 and ns4 and have then pointed to the IPs at the new server, then update all the domains I control. The rest of the customers I can email and ask them to add the additional nameservers. I know... good luck on them doing it.
2. I change the ns2 IP to go to the new server. And I make sure when I make edits on a website during the day that I FTP to both servers.
3. I don't have any nameservers assigned to the new server. I just change the IP on the existing nameservers in the event of an emergency.
I'm working on a plan for restoring my whole Plesk server fast in a worst case scenario. Which will never happen hopefully.
The backup is a full backup done by the Backup Manager in Plesk. It lies on a remote FTP server.
Right now I'm fetching the whole backup directory with wget while in the background the Plesk Installation is running. These actions take about 1h to complete.
Afterwards I would restore with /usr/local/psa/bin/pleskrestore.
Is there a better way? For example installing Plesk directly out of a full backup?
My host just recently sent the hard drive with my sites to a data recovery company called Gillware. Website is [url]- but they failed and gave the following reason:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gillware
Unfortunately, your file system was so severely damaged that no data can be recovered. We will make arrangements to return your drive via UPS. Sorry we could not help you further.
Gillware Inc.
Do you guys think there's still hope?
The hard drive is now being shipped to a more well known company, Drive Savers - [url]and I'm guessing that this is the last hope, because the more the drive gets tampered with, the more chance of permanent data loss.
So yeah.. I was just wondering what you think? If the file system is so severely damaged, do you think it STILL can be recovered?
I have been landed with 2 servers which a friend was using them for some 'neighborhood' gaming for all the kids to play CSS, TF2 ect. together, and he doesnt want them anymore.
I have just spent a fortune upgrading (£1,800.00-ish), and I have been approched by someone who wants them for £2799.99, which I thought was good, but I also heard about rent them our to Data Centers.
If was to approch a Datacenter with them (not litterly with them), Would data centers consider renting these off me? Are they up to scratch? Or doesnt It work like that?
Opinions needed.
Server 1 Specs:
Core i7 Extreem-975 - 4.00GHz 8GB RAM 2 TB Memory Windows Server 2008
Server 2 Specs
Core i7 Extreem-950 - 3.06GHz 8GB RAM 2 TB Memory Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
I have built a server and want to colocate it in a datacenter and rent it out with full root access, my query is, how much do you think the following setup would be worth to a customer monthly
2 x 1.8Gz Opteron (200 series) 3GB ECC Ram 1x 76GB 10Krpm, 1x 500GB SATA 3300GB / 10mbits 100% unmetered monthly UK traffic
Feedback please
Im asking this because rather than locate it for myself and sell shared/reseller accounts I'd rather just rent it to 1 person to do as they wish with to save me hasle
I have been with LT for about 4 months i think and have paid already over 700 Bucks or something, and since i plan to be around for quite some time, i dont know if i should continue to rent out server or get my own big beast and get it collocated.
So all the folks out there who are doing collocation can you tell me good providers for server parts and servers and good dc's with suitable prices. Also would sticking to renting out server would be better or collocation would be suitable?
Couldn't you just remote access into your server from elsewhere? This would save you the hassle and cost of buying/installing/maintaing the KVM equipment?
In the rare case where you have no network access but need access to the server, then you could directly plug keyboard, monitor, and mouse into the server directly, right?
And in cases where you do have network access, couldn't you just plug in your laptop into the network in the colocation facility or wherever and remote access to the servers sitting two feet away from you?
We have 3 1-U servers and a 1-U UPS located in a datacenter in Vancouver. If we were also located in Vancouver, I'd probably just eBay things off. However, I'm not anywhere close to there, and I can't ask the people running the datacenter to package them up and ship them off to eBay sellers. Any suggestions for how to get rid of the equipment and maybe make some money?
I did some Googling for computers liquidators in Vancouver and didn't find much. Ideally I'd want some local firm to just show up, pick up the goods, and at some point pay me for them.
Since they had disaster with their billing system it seems their support is falling apart also. I submitted a support ticket 1 month ago and still no reply!?
As I sit here typing this I have a stack of 10 1U 866MHZ P3 Servers in front of me.
Sometimes its possible to sell these off to some sorry soul on ebay, however if not ebay what else? I would hate to throw them out and I would like to think they could be used for something. Perhaps I could upgrade the hard drives and turn them into file servers, but then how could I even break even with the cost of co-location.
I've been searching Google for a few days in hopes of finding companies that take off lease server equipment (sometimes almost brand new) and auctioning it off to people.
I've been buying alot of equipment through resellers of these places but I would like to cut out the middle man expense and bid for myself.
For example. This week I purchased ten Dell PowerEdge R200's with X3220 Xeon CPU's in them. These are fairly new. I don't want to buy first generation single-core xeon servers.
Look forward to finding out who is supplying these people.
After a year we are here to see if we have any changes in the market of ddos protection equipment that dedicated server companies or datacenters can use to protect their networks and clients from different kinds of attacks.
Me and my friend are looking to place a few servers for a soho (3 servers or so). We need advise as the incoming connectivity will be fiber so we need to know what do we need to receive that fiber, we opted to go for the catalyst 2950 for the switch but if there's a good fiber switch,
Over the next year we are working to migrate all of our shared servers from leased dedicated servers to our own collocated equipment. As you can imagine it is a slow process, but we are getting there.
By this next week we will have about ten servers and a couple of switches colo'd. I am thinking it is time we looked at insuring the equipment we have colo'd and get it taken care of before we build up the volume anymore.
Is anyone able to recommend someone we may be able to contact to obtain insurance on our equipment? All of our equipment is at Colo4Dallas, in Dallas, TX split between our rack there and their secure storage room (spare parts, switch, chassis etc.).
I tried contacting our insurance company here in the United Kingdom to see if we could add it on to our office insurance but they became very hesitant when I mentioned the hardware was in Dallas, despite the fact it is probably more secure in the Colo4Dallas data center than our office.
So I guess we would be looking for a US insurance company that specializes in this type of thing. We would be looking to protect against equipment being damaged due to things like power surges, being dropped by a technician etc.
In light of whats happened at the Planet in Houston we are moving up our plans to have an external DNS nameserver (with failover) and emergency website to alert customers in the event of our data center (C4D in Dallas) ever goes down.
From all the forum messages reagrds this event its apparent that a lot of hosting companies are suffering the worst from having their support websites at the DC where they host their customers and have no way of notifying their customers of whats going on.
Looking to trade 1U of rack space and 1 ip address anywhere in US (Dallas preferred) with someone else who is looking for the same thing.
While we are extremely happy with C4D and have faith in their DC, you can never be 100% prepared for things beyond your control.
Fire sale at HE on used Cisco core router equipment
[url]
I wonder if some data center will purchase it just to hook it up for the flashing lights... would be quite impressive. Wait a second, that was already done in North Atlanta and Las Vegas, wasnt it?
I wonder why HE didnt donate it to the tech museum in San Jose... would have been a better write off then selling it.
why I am musing so far off topic on a gorgeous Sunday morning?
I am just colocating servers and managing them myself, and renting services off of them. In the future I would like to start offering dedicated servers as well. I am wondering if many companies do this, or if its more of a general practice to just setup as a reseller? The worst part that comes to mind is thinking of how to do billing for the bandwidth per month. With my setup I would only be offering flat bandwidth packages (like 2TB a month) but even so, I cant think of anyway to automate it so WHMCS knows if they went over, if so, how much, etc.
I heard from some technicians that SAS disk recovery is going to be much more difficult than the current generation of hard disk. Is it true? Anyone tried recovering from a spoilt SAS hard disk before?
who you have used in the past to recover damanged hard drives that have been dropped. I got a client that damanged his HD, and it needs to be sent out to someone who is reliable is not gonna cheat and steal the data.
if someone have for mistake cancelled a cpanel account and in the same dir was the backup file of this account, should be possible to recovery at least the backup file from the deleted files? Or the entire dir cancelled?
I am trying to recover some backups on the server by rsync the home dir from BQbackup to my server. I deleted 1 file to see whether it actually works. I executing this command on the server:
I saw that it downloaded the file I deleted, however after checking on FTP if the file was recovered it actually wasn't. Is there something wrong in the command I used as it seems that it is not recovering any files.
