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Re: Remote admin.
Hi,
Itamar S.-T. wrote:
>
> I am soon going to have to set up a web server which I'm going to have to
> keep running remotely, possibely by giving instructions to some
> technician who's going to be there.
>
> What I'm going to do is:
> 1. have two copies of everything including root filesystem on two
> seperate harddisks in case one of them fails, and boot diskettes. Is
> there any way to make it automatically boot off the second drive if the
> first one fails?
I have a simple solution (I think :-).
Make two floppy boot-disks. Each with a kernel configured to boot from
one of the disks. With a nice black marker, mark one "1" and the other
"2". All a technician has to do, is insert the appropriate disk.
Now, when you leave the machine working off disk "1", leave floppy "2"
in the drive, if the machine reboots, it will automatically "activate"
disk "2".
Its probably a good idea to make several copies of each floppy.
Floppies are not reliable.
The tricky part is to make sure that the machine actually does reboot,
and not just hangs. I think there are hardware-watchdogs that can do
that, but I really don't know much about this.
If you're looking for stability-through-redundancy, why not consider
having two complete systems (in different locations if you're really
paranoid).
> 2. send me e-mail notification at every shutdown and startup.
>
> 3. have a script once an hour to ping the server, and check the the httpd
> is running, and scream bloody hell if they're not working.
Its best to do this from a different machine. If the server dies
completely, or some other terrible thing happens to it, it might not be
able to send mail.
>
> Can you thing of anything else / any tips which might help?
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Itamar S.-T. itamars@ibm.net
> The Animated Artist <--> http://www.maxnm.com <--> Jewish Heritage
Hopefully helpful ...
-Itai