[Linux-HA] Newbie needs some setup advice

[Mike Bobkiewicz]

Hi,
desaster has hitten one of my servers, I was on vacation and the rest of
crew had problems activating the fallback server so I have to find an
other solution. Please let me discribe what we have now:
Both machines are running Trustix Linux 2.2. The main  server is running
the following tasks: postfix IMAP/SMTP server with anti spam and anti
virus, smb server, netatalk server, groupware server, backup server,
backup dns server, zabbix and during night some maintenace tasks on some
windows servers. It?s a "histroical" grown machine like most linux
servers when I first introduced linux to the company it was only allowed
to serve the macs, later on followed aditional machines nobody else
wants for some other tasks, finally a IBM eServer arrived for mail and
backups and when the older machines died their services and ip adresses
moved over to this machine. The standby machine is a Dell PowerEdge
1600.  The current backup system works this way: a ssh/rsync script
copied over the changed data of the email server every five minutes
(around 25 users) the mysql database syncs once an hour and the backup
system copies over its stuff after it has finished it?s daily backups.
The standby system has actually the following setup: a small system is
getting the data from the main server and copies it to the mounted
hotstandby system disk.
To bring the hotstandby system up both servers had to be powered down,
the sdlt drives had to be switched over to the hotstandby server. Then
you start the hotstandby machine select the second entry in grub and the
server is up and running. Regular tests and desaster demonstrated that
this system works, the offline time of around 10 minutes are not
critical but it shows off that this senario is more than an experienced
windows user can take even it was shown to him several times...
Now they want to have this automated, I?ve mentioned this also one or
two times but they won?t give me a second machine and when I got my
hands on a second machine time was the main part of setting up the
backup server so I had chosen the rsync way.
At this point I have compiled heartbeat sw and did some of the initial
setup. During this I came across the section where I can configure ip
adresses of the server. While around every service has it?s own adress
on the server there is a total of eight. Now I?m wondering if I leave
them as aliases files in network-scripts or should I put them inside
the heartbeat config file? Are there any known issues with any service
when the ip adresses are configured within the heartbeat config file?

Best regards,

  Mike