[rt-users] Advice sought on Backing-up RT data, and High Availability of RT server.

[Michael K Brown]

Hi folks!

I'm looking for advice on keeping an RT server running.  I'm a technician
deploying RT into an R&D environment, in order to track service requests of
our user community.  I'm going to be installing RT on Dual Processor
Ultra-2's 512MB RAM with Solaris 8 as the OS, and the latest versions of
Apache, MySQL, and mod_perl.  I'm contemplating running "Heartbeat" and a
second server as a failover machine.  I'm also thinking about keeping the
data on a High Availability file server (IT provided through NFS mounts).

Now, I'm not a UNIX expert, and I don't have much experience with MySQL
either.  How would failing over from one machine to another (assuming
they're kept in sync with rsync every 5 min) affect the RT system?  Would it
cause me more grief than merely backing up the system, and rebuilding the
machine should it go down?  My big concern is that the data doesn't get
scrambled.  I would like to keep the RT system alive (as I'm sure we'll come
to depend on it) but I want to make sure the data stays intact.  Should I
run the Failover machine, or just have a crontab job to backup the machine
to the HA fileserver?

I would appreciate any advice from folks already running RT, and how you
handle your backup of data.  It looks like an awesome request tracking
system, which is just what I need!

Thanks for your time!

Mike