RedHat 9 Server Backup

Hi All,

I am going to be setting up RedHat 9 with samba as a file server. I am
going to use a Serial ATA hard drive for the main drive. I would like to
back this drive up onto drive another Serial ATA hard drive of the same size
by imaging the two (Like using ghost), so I can take one of the drives out
and have a back up of all the files including the RedHat partions. I would
like to configure it in away that if the main hard drive fails I can place
the second drive and the server is running again. I have heard of this been
done using ATA-133 but not SATA. If it is possible how would you configure
RedHat 9 do this and what would be a suitable SATA hotswap rack to use?

Thanks In Advance, Peter

"Peter" <peter@gulffm.com.au> wrote in message
news:3f097cac@news.leadingedgeinternet.net.au...
>
> Hi All,
>
> I am going to be setting up RedHat 9 with samba as a file server. I am
> going to use a Serial ATA hard drive for the main drive. I would like to
> back this drive up onto drive another Serial ATA hard drive of the same
size
> by imaging the two (Like using ghost), so I can take one of the drives out
> and have a back up of all the files including the RedHat partions. I
would
> like to configure it in away that if the main hard drive fails I can place
> the second drive and the server is running again. I have heard of this
been
> done using ATA-133 but not SATA. If it is possible how would you
configure
> RedHat 9 do this and what would be a suitable SATA hotswap rack to use?

I prefer to keep the spare mounted in a different machine and just rsync
over
the network periodically, but swapping the drive in and out should work too.
The only problem with rsync is that it doesn't make the drive bootable so
you'll need a boot floppy (or with many distributions the install CD in
rescue mode) to bring up the spare to a point where you can re-run lilo
or grub to fix it. You'll also need to fix /etc/fstab to refer to the
partition
device names instead of labels if they aren't identical on the 2nd disk.
One
way to make everything identical would be set up a raid-1 mirror set that
normally runs with a drive missing, then periodically add the drive back
and sync with 'raidhotadd' or 'mdadm --add'.

---
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@comcast.net