[Casper] Disaster Recovery

[Miles Leacy]

When I discuss DR, I am assuming that any "DR box" exists at a secondary
location.
Having a DR site, or a general DR plan is a big issue, especially for for
smaller, single-site organizations.

Moving backups to an off-site location is part of any worthwhile backup
strategy, and I generally assume this is being done.  There
are services that will handle this for you, or in the case of a small
organization, having an employee take backup media home with them could be a
workable solution.

Getting a co-located server or servers can provide a DR site without the
expense of maintaining a second facility.

----------
Miles A. Leacy IV

 Certified System Administrator 10.4
 Certified Technical Coordinator 10.5
 Certified Trainer
Certified Casper Administrator
----------
voice: 1-347-277-7321
miles.leacy at themacadmin.com
www.themacadmin.com




On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Smith, William <
william.smith at merrillcorp.com> wrote:

> So far, I've heard a lot about recovering from server failures but nothing
> really yet about Disaster Recovery, which assumes a natural or man-made
> disaster to infrastructure.
>
> Copying/replicating/moving information from one server to another locally
> is
> ideal for when servers fail but what about when tornados or terrorists
> strike and destroy the entire site?
>
> True Disaster Recovery needs to include methods for securely moving and
> maintaining data offsite and having hardware available (renting if
> necessary) to set up the server(s) again. It also needs to include the
> business's tolerance for downtime. For some this could be a week and for
> others this could be just a few hours. For Casper Suite this means you not
> only have to back up the JSS but also your repository, which in our case is
> several GB.
>
> This is especially tricky to do if you don't have a second site in your
> organization. However, if you do then copying/replicating/moving to a
> second
> site that can assume the core responsibilities of the first site would be
> ideal.
>
> Single site companies may benefit from having a service in the cloud for
> storing encrypted data. This isn't ideal but it would be the easiest to
> automate. A firewire hard drive that is synced daily and taken home by a
> company IT admin might do just as well depending on the distance between
> work and home.
>
> --
>
> bill
>
> William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
> MCS IT
> Merrill Communications, LLC
> (651) 632-1492
>
>
> On 2/10/09 11:48 AM, "Ryan Harter" <rharter at uwsp.edu> wrote:
>
> > I've got a similar setup to Craig, but I have 3 DPs (one xserve and two
> g5
> > powermacs running client) that i've setup a cron job to copy the nightly
> > backups to.  In case of failure we just run Setup Util on the secondary
> server
> > and import the latest nightly and then we still have 3 distro points
> while we
> > fix the other server.
> >
> > On Feb 10, 2009, at 11:09 AM, Thomas Larkin wrote:
> >
> >> I have an ODM back up, that is sync'd and is set to a replica.  In the
> case
> >> of failure I would demote the ODM to a stand alone via server admin, and
> >> promote the replica to the Master server.  It is a server that just sits
> >> there and does nothing besides sync LDAP.
> >>
> >> For my casper servers, I would just load the JSS on one of my xserve
> >> distribution points and then create a policy that edits the
> /etc/jamf.conf
> >> and points it to the new JSS master while the other one is being worked
> on.
> >>
> >>>>> Miles Leacy <miles.leacy at themacadmin.com> 02/10/09 10:56 AM >>>
> >> I'd say your DR machine ought to serve as a secondary repository that is
> >> regularly synched.  You should be running regular backups of your JSS,
> >> scheduled through JSS Setup Utility and then backed up via whatever
> backup
> >> system you have in place.
> >>
> >> When disaster strikes, you can run the JSS Setup utility on the DR
> machine,
> >> and import your last backup.
> >>
> >>
> >> 2009/2/10 Cyrus Vahhaji
> >> <Cyrus.Vahhaji at bestbuy.com>
> >>
> >>> I'm looking into implementing Disaster Recovery and wanted to see how
> users
> >>> on this list go about doing this for JSS. Currently have two servers
> >>> dedicated for JSS use. One is the production server running JSS and
> >>> repository for all data/packages. The other is in stand by in case case
> >>> primary goes down. What I like to learn is how quickly you can recover
> if
> >>> your primary goes down and how you go about backing up/sync to your
> 2ndry
> >>> server if any.
>
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