fastest way to duplicate production server?

Freddie Cash fcash at ocis.net
Tue Jul 12 22:06:22 GMT 2005


On July 12, 2005 02:45 pm, RC wrote:
> We have a production FreeBSD 4.10 server running old versions of
> Apache/MySQL/PHP from ports.  We'd like to upgrade Apache/MySQL/PHP
> to the latest versions.  Before upgrading we'd like to test on a
> test box.

> What's the fastest way of duplicating the existing Apache/MySQL/PHP
> (including user databases)?  (The production server cannot go down
> for more than a few seconds.)

1.  dump / restore (probably not feasible on 4.x since there's no 
snapshots)
2.  do a minimal install on the new box and rsync everything over from the 
live box
3.  use bsdtar and an ssh tunnel to copy everything over from the old box
4.  install dar and use that to archive everything, transfer the archive 
over to the new box and restore it there
5.  buy a harddrive cloner (only feasible if the box can be done for a 
while)
6.  dd over an ssh tunnel may also work

I've used a variations of 3 (giant tarball of the whole drive burned to CD) 
and 4 (giant dar archive of the whole drive copied around the network) 
with great success.
-- 
Freddie Cash
fcash at ocis.net


More information about the freebsd-isp mailing list