[H-GEN] Exchange Woes

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Adrian Sutton wrote:

> * We actually have some pretty serious backup software, specifically
> Veritas NetBackup which backs up to a bank of tapes each night.  The
> trouble has been that Active Directory doesn't restore easily,
> essentially requiring everything to be exactly the same as when the
> backup was taken or it just causes the entire server to bluescreen and
> then you have to reinstall the system.  We also use the builtin
> NTBackup and it did the same thing on restoration.

It's funny.  The MS world really has trailed Unix in terms of easy
disaster recovery.  To me it is almost like they haven't thought DR
through properly.  I've seen these sorts of problems on MS systems as
well.  I simply don't stand for it.

> Our windows systems don't break for the most part, but every so often
> every system goes bad, I'd like something that comes good again easier.

This is really what I was getting at.  Again, not sure you've seen Unix in
action in a serious environment but this "going bad for no reason" stuff
is rubbish.  If I see a tool or OS acting that way in the bin it goes.

The older I get the less tolerance I have for rubbish software :)

>   We lost a hard drive in our e250 a few weeks ago but it (fortunately)
> had raid and could easily be replaced and resynced.  One of the steps
> we've taken is mandated that all servers must use RAID drives which
> should help significantly.

Bearing in mind that RAID will only help with some failure modes.  If
someone blows a large portion of your filesystem away RAID will dutifully
carry out the operation on all mirrors.

> I completely agree, though you actually have to get a good one too.

Yeah, this was implicit :)

> One of the problems we have is that there's really only one or two
> hours work a week for a sysadmin here but we need them to be there when

This works for some consulting firms.  I've worked for several such firms
and now own one :)

> we need them to do something.  That tends to make it quite expensive to
> have anyone around.  Personally I'd prefer that we get someone in to
> set things up and then get some training for one or two of the
> programmers to be able to perform the routine maintenance - check logs,
> check backups, run apt-get upgrade.  Then someone can come in once
> every month or two check things are all going smoothly and do a test
> run of the backups - I guess that counts as on contract...

If you are using Unix servers there is no need for them to visit
physically except in the case of a serious problem.  A Unix sysadmin will
use the command line to manage & fix the system so location becomes
relatively unimportant.

> I'd also like to point out that I'm well aware of the importance of
> backup plans - I just don't actually have the experience required to
> put together one that's effective - nor do I have time as it's outside
> my role in the company.  I've been pushing to get someone in or train
> someone to be able to do this though.  Just so you didn't think I was
> totally incompetent (rather than just mostly incompetent).

I didn't :)  I just like to mention it, partly so you can go back to your
company and say "see, other people point this stuff out too!".  Too many
companies ignore the need for a good backup/DR plan.  Sometimes it is to
their detriment.

Humbug members have some great stories about large organisations that did
not do good backups.  My favourite the bank story.  'nuff said.

> For those interested in how the restore is going - the Solaris box
> running PC-NetLink seems to have saved our bacon and has now taken over
> as the primary domain controller complete with all our login info
> intact.  It appears to have been a secondary controller for some time
> but wasn't running any login services.  We may yet get out of this
> without any data loss. :)

Cool.  Good luck.

Cheers,
	Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, rbrockway at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah