Recovery Help ...

[divya at avnika.com]

> Divya Sundaram <divya at avnika.com> writes:
>
>> In the meantime, I would like to focus on the following question:
>> what's the best way to back up the CNFS buffers? This is a very
>> important question for our Intranet newsgroups that sit in dedicated
>> 2GB CNFS Spools.
>
> I really don't recommend using CNFS for something that you want to back
> up.  Is there something about those groups that makes tradspool a bad
> choice?  tradspool is considerably easier to back up since the articles
> are just files in a directory structure and pretty much all the
> metainformation that you need can be recovered from the directory
> hierarchy.
>

Well, the reason I chose CNFS was the fixed size of the spooling
area and not having to worry about setting expiration on a per
newsgroup/hierarchy basis.

The tradspool method has its own issues - for example, on a 200GB
disk, I could quite easily run out of inodes (I have in the past on
a UFS partition of 40GB). Expiration is a nightmare on a system that
is not dedicated to be a news server. CNFS is considerably more
idiotproof in this regard.

Aside from a couple of "master" or Hub News servers, many innd
installations tend to share the server with other tasks. For example,
the server I manage also has a ~200GB repository of Open Source
software (mirrors of the GNU FTP Site, CYGWIN, CPAN, and other
resources) as well as sundry other operations. All this on a 866Mhz
PIII with 1GB RAM running RedHat Linux.

So, if I was running in tradspool mode and also running expire,
I suspected that it would impact I/O adversely (even though the
news server and the FTP repository are on separate controllers
and disks from each other and from the OS).

Perhaps my prior experiences with tradspool have unjustly led to
my avoiding that method of article storage, but aside from power
outages and an occasional hardware hiccup, the news server using
CNFS has been extremely responsive. Frankly, I'd like to buy the
folks who thought up and implemented CNFS a relaxing beverage of
their choice.

I am considering shutting down INND at night, scp-ing off the CNFS
buffers to another system along with the active file and then restarting
INND. The problem with that approach is that the folks in Asia for
whom my night represents working hours are not thrilled about the
idea.

The other issue was how to make another server a replica of an existing
server with identical article numbering so that the loss of one
news server does not represent downtime. This would be important in
those areas where the news service is used for customer service (for
example) purposes as a way to enhance discussions between the support
staff and customers. But we can tackle that later.

Thanks again for your continuing help.

Regards

Divya Sundaram