From: Ivo De Decker (ivo_at_zeus.rug.ac.be)
Date: Sat 23 Nov 2002 - 04:49:34 GMT
On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 11:24:51AM -0800, Cathy Sarisky wrote:
> These directions work great, thanks for sharing them! The ability to move a vserver so easily is wonderful.
>
> I have just one question/comment: Moving a group of vservers with rsync doesn't preserve file unification, so rsyncing a handful of vservers takes a LONG time and consumes a lot of disk space on the server one is rsyncing to, until a vunify run anyway. (I had a 500MB unified vserver that required 2.5GB disk space after moving, for example.)
>
> Any thoughts (or scripts to share) anyone about backing up vservers more efficiently?
Rsync manpage:
-H, --hard-links
This tells rsync to recreate hard links on the remote system to be the
same as the local system. Without this option hard links are treated like
regular files.
Note that rsync can only detect hard links if both parts of the link are in
the list of files being sent.
This option can be quite slow, so only use it if you need it.
The probably means that if you sync the entire vserver directory, the hard
links will be preserved.
I've used rsync to sync vservers for some time now, and it works great. (I
didn't use unification so I don't know about that)
Moving a vserver from one server to another (eg for hardware intervention)
happens with a downtime of less than 1 minute.
Some things to look at:
If the ARP timeout of the router is high (on cisco default 5 hours!) moving
the vserver won't work. Set the timeout to something lower (or ask your ISP to
do so).
It probably is best to rsync the entire vserver first, and to do a selective
rsync (only the directories that might have changed; in most cases /usr can be
excluded from that, which saves a lot of time) when the vserver is stopped.
Ivo De Decker