Richard Martin's Blog

On a PowerEdge 2950 as root:

yum install xen

install a remote Centos 5.3 image from my local mirror…

virt-install

eh… that’s it.  Rather simple.  See here for proof….

Now for Windows Server 2003…..  Perhaps a longer post is looming…

I’m a great fan of Bucardo for PostgreSQL replication…. it’s stable but quite hard to use…. if you want fire and (not) forget replication try RubyRep…. awesome.  The documentation is perfect but to make it even easier, if you are testing and messing around… uninstall, then re-scan, then replicate otherwise you might get some bizarre replication errors, or foreign key contraint issues etc… anything odd, just un-install, then re-scan and replicate.  It really is full proof… well it worked for me!

For the cut & paste brigade: (RTFM)

rubyrep generate myrubyrep.conf

rubyrep scan -c myrubyrep.conf

nohup rubyrep replicate -c myrubyrep.conf &

Remember the nohup and the &, to background it, unless you’re actually at the console of the production server – which you probably aren’t….  In fact stick the nohup and & on the scan command too as that could take a few hours on a big DB…

Then tail -f nohup.out to watch the (lack) of output, output is normally bad – loss of connection:

2009-07-31T22:22:13+01:00 Exception caught: no connection to ‘right’ database

and what not… but rubyrep will just keep going once the connection comes back up.  Perfect!

Here goes, will it work with CentOS 5.3 and Windows Server 2003 guests?  This is what I did and the general setup….

If you mess with your DNS and need to reload the latest DNS entries clear your DNS cache with:

dscacheutil -flushcache

I’ve been playing with this for years.  Nothing works without major work – OK I’m lazy.  Now I can spend $500 and get pretty good replication for my linux servers, single windows server, and all the code, stuff and my precious PostgreSQL databases – at last.  I love Bucardo for great FREE replication and now I know how it works I’ll be using all over the place but if you want an easy life and good sleep check out R1 software

Boy, it’s made my life a lot easier…….

unless you don’t backup your CDP linux backup software database….. and then you lose ALL your backups…. so if you use CDP backup software backup your /usr/r1soft directly ALL the time…. if that directory gets corrupted – you’re screwed….