Backing up hobbit

Josh Luthman wrote:

Stef,

Thanks for the suggestions!  I'll keep these in mind when it comes 
time to creating my backups.

For now I deleted the core* files and within a few minutes the 
server/bin dir started filling up with the core* files.  I looked at 
history.log and I see 25165 lines that look like:

2007-10-18 17:39:05 Cannot open the all-events file '/home/user/data/hist/allevents'
2007-10-18 17:39:05 Worker process died with exit code 139, terminating
  
The log is filled with this pair of lines, over and over (though I 
don't know why the number of lines is odd).  What should this 
allevents file contain?

This file contains a list of all event changes, i.e. when a test changes 
colour. It is the basic history file.

Is it writable by your hobbit user?

Iain

Josh

On 10/19/07, *Stef Coene* <user-dbffe946c0f4@xymon.invalid 
<mailto:user-dbffe946c0f4@xymon.invalid>> wrote:

    On Thursday 18 October 2007, Josh Luthman wrote:

I've only had Hobbit running since last Monday.  I have
    restarted it twice
to ensure that my configurations would take place (things like
    changing the
WWW hostname).  I last restarted it yesterday and it has been
    running since
yesterday, so I know if it is restarting it takes more then a
    day.  I have
40787 total core* files in ~/server and 569364 total core* files in
~/server/bin - couldn't possibly have restarted that many times!

    Look at the timestamps of these files.  Each crash can create a
    core file.  So
    each visit to the hobbit site, every poll hobbit does, every rrd
    update can
    create a crash and a core file.  I never had a crash/core file,
    but in theory
    it can.
    We also use vmware so if a hobbit server goes down, I copy the
    vmware guest
    that I use to deploy new installations, copy over the etc
    directory, goes to
    the custumer, pick a computer/desktop/laptop/server, install
    vmware player
    and hobbit is running again.

Stef - If you have two Hobbit servers and duplicate your
    actions, why do
you note your actions?  My original plan was to tar the home
    directory of
the hobbit user, but as

    I don't have 2 hobbit servers, but more then 20 located for our
    customers.
    The bare mimal I need for re-creating the same setup is the
    contents of etc
    and some extra information I collected during the installation
    (hostname,
    network settings, ...).

"Hobbit User" - I could use rsync and it would make backups though I
normally don't use rsync as I like to have daily backups, in
    case I make a
mistake on Monday, the backup is done Tuesday and I catch it on

    Wednesday -

I can revert to Sunday with daily backups.  Rsync could have
    backed up my
problem making it useless in this scenario!  I have a scripts
    that backup
necessary components (like databases) and then finally tar with
    gzip
compression and then SCP the file to a remote data center (I
    also use
public keys to automate this).  I have found this works very
    well in my
situation and has saved my life in the case of a MySQL database
    crash!

    You don't have to rsync everything in the same way.  If you look
    at the hobbit
    server data, the stuff in the data directory takes op 99% of the
    disk space.
    And that stuff can be rsync'd and overwritten daily.  For the server
    installation, you can also use rsync but do something like this:
    rsync -Auhv --delete ~hobbit/server/
    <remote>:/backup/hobbit/server-`date +%a`
    So every day of the week you will have a new directory so you have
    a history
    of 7 days.

Would it be safe for me to delete these core files and start
    working on
this task from this day forward?  What can I use to read these
    core files?
I noticed they're not text files so I assume there is some bb
    utility to
read them.  With the exception of these core* files, I would
    expect Hobbit
to peak at 200MB which I could do in a ~3 minutes

    You can delete the core files, but you should also try to find out
    why the are
    created.  If you use rsync, you can exclude these core files from
    being
    rsync'd


    Stef


-- 
Josh Luthman
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Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
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