[plug] Dying Samba Server

[Tomasz Grzegurzko]

On 11/8/06, Daniel Pearson (Flashware Solutions) <daniel at flashware.net> wrote:
> Tomasz Grzegurzko wrote:
> > On 11/6/06, Daniel Pearson (Flashware Solutions)
> > <daniel at flashware.net> wrote:
> >> Tomasz Grzegurzko wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >> Dead HDD? :(
> >> >
> >> > Probably. Or RAM. But given the DMA stuff I'd be looking at the HDD
> >> > quite squarely. You did back up and stuff after I suggested it could
> >> > be that before right? =)
> >> >
> >> > Tomasz
> >> > _______________________________________________
> >> I ended up ghosting onto a spare drive, then running fdisk /mbr from a
> >> Win 98 boot floppy (as GRUB wouldn't start up..), and then all was good.
> >>
> >> Ran Seagate's utility on the drive, showed it as being no good, so
> >> getting that RA'd now.. Going to dump in a second hard drive now, and
> >> RSync to it every night.
> >>
> >>
> >> Was lucky this time, but maybe next time I won't be.. so will follow a
> >> strict backup routine :)
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> >> http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> >> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au
> >>
> > Software RAID may be a good option for a server-kind of machine if you
> > have to rebuild the beast anyway (or if you make a tarball of the
> > whole HDD)..
> >
> > Anyway looks like you've found and fixed the problem.
> Didn't have to rebuild - which was good. Have purchased another HDD of
> the same size, and planning to do an RSync to it every night (incremental).
>
> Is the best way a shell script that will:
> - mount drive
> - rsync
> - unmount
>
> Should I be complicating the script more than that?
>
> Cheers; Dan

Why not go a software raid (unless hardware raid is available?) option?
Otherwise you don't need to mount it (you can just leave it in fstab
if you want) and make a tarball or rsync (or whatever) to it via cron
job nightly or whatever takes your fancy.. But your script sounds just
fine. Maybe alert on error?
/sbin/do_backup || /sbin/email_alert someone at somewhere.com

Tomasz