[Casper] Disaster Recovery

[Ernst, Craig S.]

You are very right in that it really does mean something that is off-site. Right now we don't really have that for anything we have on our campus that I'm aware, although we know we need to do that. We are starting to partner with one of our neighbor universities.

Playing the odds game right now, the two servers are in two different buildings on-campus. The likelyhood is not there that something will happen, but I imagine if both these locations are gone I'll have more important things to worry about...

So, I do agree with you, and it could be as simple as another system sitting at another institution doing nightly or weekly syncs.

Craig E


On 2/10/09 12:56 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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