I have a server a home and I host a website from it myself, i also host my own mail and all that is working well, now what I am concerned about is this what if I have a power cut or a fire or anything that stops my website or even worse kills it completly well I have an offsite backup that I do once a week so great I can get it back after I have bought a new computer and set it up, but there is still downtime, is there a way for me to create an exact duplicate on another machine of the entire website and a complete backup of the mail server that takes over if the other one is down without me doing anything, I could be at work and have a powercut could it auto switch over to the backup mail and webserver.

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/web-ho...using-dns.html

Clustering is what you need to implement first of all.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/web-ho...using-dns.html

Clustering is what you need to implement first of all.

Ok so first I have to find out how to cluster 2 mac os x server machines in seperate geographic locations together and then add a couple things to my dyndns records like this

example.com A 000.000.000.000
mail.example.com CNAME example.com
www.example.com CNAME ecample.com
mail2.example.com A 111.111.111.111
www2.example.com A 111.111.111.111

Now my only concern to doing this is that I cannot figure out how to tell my application called DNSUpdater for mac os x to allow me to do this, you see if I add a hostname as example.com, with the interface as external and the host type set to custom then it updates all A records with my same IP, so if I set another computer up with the same application in my second location i am not sure if I can just tell the first DNSUpdater to update the IP for example.com and not for mail2.example.com and www2.example.com then do the reverse of that for the other computer, I do have a checkbox in the application called Enable Wildcard and Back MX and a text field for Mail Exchanger.

I will attach a screenshot of it just for ease.

Originally Posted by scorpioserve

I have a server a home and I host a website from it myself, i also host my own mail and all that is working well, now what I am concerned about is this what if I have a power cut or a fire or anything that stops my website or even worse kills it completly well I have an offsite backup that I do once a week so great I can get it back after I have bought a new computer and set it up, but there is still downtime, is there a way for me to create an exact duplicate on another machine of the entire website and a complete backup of the mail server that takes over if the other one is down without me doing anything, I could be at work and have a powercut could it auto switch over to the backup mail and webserver.

OMG GRAMMER! You can use an actual period (.) from time to time.

I do not know what GRAMMER is; sorry.

This may help, even though it is off topic.
Grammer.png

Unless you meant.
Grammar.png

Otherwise I do greatly appreciate the; English lesson.

By the way, do you have anything to say about backup mail servers, web servers, or clustering. I would love your input. I have been a member here for more than, uhh lets say 9 days, but I still have so much to learn. After all, I know you have this kind of information, because you have your very own hosing company Edward.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

, that's what happens when you try to be a smart***... you forget to use the good ol' spell check.

Would it not be easier just to do a round robin DNS setup? You accomplish pretty much the same thing with a lower cost and less hassle.

Originally Posted by TurnkeyInternet

Would it not be easier just to do a round robin DNS setup? You accomplish pretty much the same thing with a lower cost and less hassle.

Thanks this has got me thinking.

I wonder if it would work for my situation. You see my concern is that I do not have any static IP addresses, so I will have to see if there is a way to leverage the power of dyndns's solution to do that, but retain the dynamic IP's.

My question is this if I did manage to impliment such a system, how would this work. As far as my understanding goes on this subject, is that all the servers in the round robin need to be exact duplicates of eachother, now that is fine but the site I am hosting has a database that changes constantly. So lets say that user 1, requests my site and gets the 1st IP in the pool, and then enters something into my db, then the second user who gets the second IP in the pool, will not be able to see what the other has updated in the db. Please advise if I am on the wrong track here.

>the mail server that takes over if the other one is down without me doing anything

You can define an MX entry for one or more backup mailservers.

Originally Posted by _coda_

>the mail server that takes over if the other one is down without me doing anything

You can define an MX entry for one or more backup mailservers.

I realize that you can have multiple mail servers with different priority MX records. It works great in situations where the main mail server goes down for 30 minutes, even a couple of days. When you get it back up and running then it takes over again as the main mail server. However there would surely be a possibility of some mail loss. Example: you send me a mail from you@yourMX.com at 1:00pm to me@myMX.com, the mail exchanger on myMX.com gets it at 1:02pm and keeps it in it's mail store until the user with the email address of me@myMX.com requests it, now that user will only request it at 4:00pm, if this mail server goes down between the hours of 1:02pm and 3:59pm what happens to that mail, cause that server is down all the mail now gets handled by my backup mail server, but that mail is not in that mail store, so when the user checks, it will say he has no mail. Is there any way to fix that.

> However there would surely be a possibility of some mail loss

Sure. How you intend to reconcile the mail stores is something you will have to decide before you do this.

I'd guess for a simple setup with only a few accounts, you could go with a manual process. Complex mail services should be using a distributed mail store and multiple MTAs from the outset anyway.

I live without a backup mail server. If the server is down for a shortish period (a few hours), say for a reinstall of a distro, you are unlikely to lose any new email. Incoming mail during the outage will be queued and resent when your server is up again. Only guys that don't respect this are the spammers. Worst case is you get mail a few hours later than you normally should.

You can go with 3d party outsourced backup services
Manual - that mean that you can forget about the backup

If you are on the dedicated server you can organize that on your own - one part for the sites and another one for the backups. I mean Raid.
In this case that would be the best opportunity for you
But third party backup services still working

Originally Posted by scorpioserve

I do not know what GRAMMER is; sorry.

lol. It appears I could use a spelling lesson myself. Hope you understand, it's very difficult to read and comprehend a sentence that never ends.

Originally Posted by scorpioserve

By the way, do you have anything to say about backup mail servers, web servers, or clustering. I would love your input.

Paul,
If you want to avoid downtime due to power loss or disaster, I would recommend you co-locate your server in a good datacenter. A decent datacenter has several fail-safes to protect your server and eliminate downtime. Redundant high speed connections, power conditioners, standby power generators, and waterless fire suppression systems are standard with any reputable datacenter.

If your worried about hardware failure, fail-over clustering would be an excellent solution but can be a daunting task to setup even for experienced system admins. There are control panels available to help with clustering by making to easier to create and maintain the cluster.

Your ideal scenario is to have clustered servers that are in separate datacenters.