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Date:      Sun, 5 Aug 2001 14:42:38 +0800
From:      Alvin Sim <bsd140870@yahoo.co.uk>
To:        Christoph Sold <so@i-clue.de>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re[2]: backup server
Message-ID:  <18015804014.20010805144238@yahoo.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <3B6C4414.F112C4A6@i-clue.de>
References:  <18915082467.20010804003801@yahoo.co.uk> <3B6C4414.F112C4A6@i-clue.de>

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heya christopher,

Sunday, August 05, 2001, 02:51:00 AM, Christoph Sold wrote:

> Alvin Sim wrote:
>> 
>> i'm looking into implementing 2 servers for a dept. and am looking for
>> ways to to "mirror" a server -- ie, if one fails, all clients will
>> automagically connect to the second server -- ala NT PDC's.
>> 
>> what do i (basically) need to do/implement? any pointers to some
>> relevant docs would be great. thanks.

> There is no such thing as the magic you describe. To get a little bit of
> this ideal solution, you'd have to define

i did think over it (a lot actually) and it seems that there is no easy
solution to this, thus the question. i'm not as good in asking/speaking
technical terms so, what i want may not be waht it means but i'll try to
put it in as simple english could get (so i can understand them myself
:) )

this is a private college (a branch to their 'mother-college') that is
currently running peer-to-peer with about 200 Windows (mostly 98 and
several Me) machines that i'm trying to persuade the use of freebsd as
their server. and as you may already know, a college's demand on I.T. is
a bit high but they seem to have a somewhat limited budget. otherwise,
they would have just followed their 'mother-college' and go SunOS, which
they eventually will if we cannot come up with a solution to deliver the
said task.

i know that i have not included a whole lot of details on what i am
required to do with the server yet but i was briefly breifed that the
basics would be to have samba, web-caching, proxy, firewall and DNS.

so, a somewhat rough answers to your questions would likely be:-

> 1) which services this boxes have to provide
Samba 2.2.x (user authentication), Squid (proxy), IPFW (& NATD?) for
Internet access priviledges, Web-Caching, and maybe DNS. i'm sure there
are going to be a couple more services but this is basically the
basics/needed ones

> 2) what the least acceptable working level of that service is
Samba and? DNS, since they need the user authentication for (domain)
logons and DNS to resolve? i'm not sure if this is what you meant by
'least acceptable working level'

> 3) how to detect the failure and
this is what i am looking into as well and i really can't answer this
one. i dont know if anyone that have done a lot of years of
administration knows when a server is going to make a boo-boo either.
maybe there is this someone and maybe he'll give me some pointers in
waht to lookout for :) but i really doubt it since there are basically a
lot of probable cause for a server to go down

> 4) how to switch over that service safely to the second box.
i suppose this is the subject line. how does an NT server works in a DC
environment? basically, this is what i was thinking of doing but... how
do you make freebsd do something similar? (ie, synchronizing all datas -
if at all possible, which i doubt, at a certain interval time?) i dont
know, frankly.

> each of those considerations is pretty complicated, and there is no such
> thing as a standard definition. Thus you have either to invest some time
> to think about it, or pay some amount of money to get somebody who does.

i have been wrecking my brains for the past 3 weeks or so and the
solution is still hazy. i would really like to make this project happen
but the lack of in-depth knowledge in freebsd/unix is one of it and the
other would be supporting freebsd users/friends which comes up to (near)
zero percent in my area. well, if you're interested in doing the
thinking... :)


> HTH
> -Christoph Sold



-- 
Alvin bsd140870@yahoo.co.uk


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