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March 21, 2012

More Backup Automation

Filed under: Board Management, Server Management — Dave Rathbun @ 1:34 pm

Some years back I purchased a couple of NetGear Duo RAID disk enclosures. Each enclosure was loaded up with dual 1TB disk drives from Western Digital. Everything written to one drive was mirrored to the second drive. This helped protect against a single disk failure.

I also had a very old (PIII processor!) computer that was running linux. At one point I was using it as a development environment, but it had long since been retired from that duty. Why was it still around? I had created mount points for each of the RAID arrays on this linux box, and it was responsible for going to my web server (which hosts this blog, among other things) and downloading the nightly database backup files. (My web server runs a hot backup at 1AM each morning using the mysqldump command.) This linux box also had a script (running at 2AM) that would ftp to my web server, retrieve all of the database dumps, download them, add a date stamp to the file name, and then copy the resulting files out to the RAID array. The entire process was automatic, transparent, and for a long time was quite robust.

Until a few weeks ago. More…

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April 2, 2008

Using iptables Rather Than .htaccess

Filed under: Server Management — Dave Rathbun @ 12:55 pm

Comments (1)

For various reasons over the past year or so I have been wondering what is the best way to block access to my server. I have used .htaccess files in the past, but they have two drawbacks. First, they have to be processed by apache everytime someone requests a page. Second, they have to be set up for every domain. It would be much more efficient to drop traffic before it even gets to apache.

That is what the iptables command does, and I think I finally got it figured out.

More…