Core Redundancy:What if?

[tschak909]

Dude, there comes a point where you have to step back and realise that you can't think of everything. Take a deep breath, and take a serious thought as to whether this really makes sense?

If the electricity goes out in your house, does it really matter?

-Thom

[johanr]

well thats exactly my point. It doesn't make sense if you don't do the redundancy to the fullest. And I am not that extreme that I am going to do that.
 But yeah, I am thinking alot!
Currently working on that.. may be corrected in the next release although my employer will not like that release

-->Now I think(!) I have not been very clear in the pre-previous statement. That was to the extreme just to show you(all) my point and to visualize even more what made Me decide Not to bother anymore about redundancy     <---

Thinking outside LMCE:
If electricity to my house is cut off for a few hours that Will matter.(live in a cold country)
 There have been events where people in my country have been without power for weeks. But when that happens off course no one will prioritise to get the LMCE core up before food is on the table..

-johan

[colinjones]

Just a thought, johan, some may have had problems with VMWare but I'm certain that they are not insurmountable as the DVD image is built on a VMWare image (check the xorg.0.log file when it first starts after a build!)

[indulis]

Actually, it could be pretty horrible to live in a house where LMCE is tied into all the home automation.

No lights for a start.  Also no phone.  Garage door does not open when you come home.  Automated locks don't open.  Climate control does not work.

I'd be happy with some way to manually move (say) a USB memory stick from one server to another to manually make it the new core.  If all my storage was on the network, I could then access the core data.

Anyway, just ideas. Future fully automated houses will have to address redundancy and availability concerns just like banks do with their vital applications.

[tschak909]

Well even with LMCE handling everything, the light switches etc, are still autonomous...

but think about it.. when the power goes out... so does everything else, right?

At worst, when LMCE goes out, your land phone line goes out... but we all have cell phones, right?

Not to say that redundancy is a bad thing.. It's what we are striving towards.. but in the mean time, it's not a bad thing to trust your house to LMCE.

-Thom

[perspectoff]

I know this is a stupid solution, but why not just have a backup hard drive image on an external hard drive? I mean, an external hard drive costs, like, $60 these days?

If the Core burned out somehow, then you just boot from this backup drive on whichever backup computer you have (you could use one of your spare Media Directors, for example).

I keep a backup image of all my mission critical servers hard drives for exactly this possibility.

Virtualization is very labor intensive as a backup/redundancy solution.

[indulis]

It probably sounds like a reasonable option to "just" backup your core regularly. 

So you have to take the core down for an hour or two while you do it.  If you have the air con, phone, all your TV recordings reliant on the core then when do you want to do this?  2 AM backups are not fun to do.

I have been thinking that a 2nd server with http://www.drbd.org/ DRBD might be the way to keep another backup server image "in sync" with the core.  Then a documented procedure to get the 2nd server up and running.

And then another procedure to "fail back" (which is often forgotten and is as hard as the "fail over").  Because you want any updates done to your data over the week it takes you to fix the original server to not be discarded.

[hari]

guys, we are talking about HA and not some financial transaction system. You won't have big financial losses or injured people if it is down for an hour or two. If you need security for your picasso even if the core is down get a dedicated panel with UPS.

br, Hari