I have always been a user enviornment type of guy. What I mean by that is I have worked at companies dealing with corporate users, and the desktops and servers that service them. My current job requires me to do that as well. Another aspect of my job also requires me to operate several websites and all the infrastructure that goes along with it. It is much different than corporate user systems. It is very challenging, but also allot of fun.
One problem we are working on is how to release updates to a system with over 8 web servers located in 2 locations (going on 3), each having a varying degree of importance. I am working with robocopy. it is a free utility in the Windows 2000 Resource kit. It allows you to take a file or directory structure and sync it with another file or directory structure. For our uses I will select a master server, and make all changes and releases on that, then robocopy all informaiton out to multiple servers. It works. I have tried it on some user directories when I needed to move data over file servers. It preserved the security levels and everything. I need to check and see if I can script this in a way that I don’t get prompted for a password when running a sync between two servers on two different windows domains. Also I believe it will work with UNC paths, but I need to try that also.
Robocopy and other great tools are tucked away in the Win2k resouce kit. If you do any windows administration, you should have this kit.
My next task involving multiple copies of data is creating a redundant FTP server. I am looking at 2 Red Hat Linux machines that RSYNC between themselves to mirror the data. We would place both servers behind a Cisco Local Director and load balance the traffic the way we would load balance a web site.
The advantage of doing these sync scripts is to take the human element out of udating things. You get continuity. We like to do the same thing with desktop updates. If you have 50 computers you don’t want some people walking around and manually updating things. You would get configuration differences between the machines. An installation package would make all the machines get the software in the exact way. Of course we actually do our desktop system updates the manual way right now. I am working on an automated system for that as well for our new office.
Besides all this reasearch going on, I have all the normal requests for things. Also we are having issues with the new Super Micro server and linux. I was not planning on running linux on this machine anyway, but I wanted to know if it would work. Keith is working through the problems.