Hi Jason,
> 1. None of the Internet resource pages for BlueQuartz (Home page,
> SourceForge, etc...) seem to be active. Is this still an active and
> supported project and if so what Web resources have I missed?
The official homepage for the BlueQuartz project is http://bluequartz.org
> 2. On the BlueLinQ page only the YUM Updater works. All the other update
> pages give: "BlueLinQ was unable to retrieve a list of packages from the
> BlueLinQ server located at ." Presumably I am supposed to fill in the
> relevant servers in the settings area. What should I put there or should I
> in fact leave as is and forget about this facility?
The only relevant menu entries in "BlueLinQ" are this:
"YUM Updater": This is how you update BlueQuartz.
"Installed Software": Shows installed PKGs and software components.
All other menu entries are more or less deprecated and a carry over from the
Sun Cobalt times when patches and updates were delivered as PKGs. They're
just left in for historical reasons and to give third party software vendors
the ability to distribute their PKGs.
> 3. Now the hard question. I would like to synchronise a second
> geographically separate server with my master for DR reasons. The second
> server will be on a different IP address and in the case of disaster I
> would point the relevant DNS records (not held on the master) to the second
> server. However I would like it if any additions/changes to the Master were
> synchronised to the secondary along with site content. Users etc... I'm
> guessing there isn't a simple solution to this?
That is something that BlueQuartz doesn't support out of the box.
There are several approaches imagineable to do that and which one is best of
course depends on the expected usage and how much time, efforts and money you
want to invest, if you want to do it in a "do it yourself" approach, or want
to buy components or entire solutions that fulfill all or most of the
required needs. Or something in the middle.
A "weak" solution would be to mirror the data through Rsync over SSH. I call
it weak, because the way BlueQuartz spreads the information around on the
disks makes it difficult to use Rsync to mirror it all. It's possible, but
you have to have a good understanding of the architecture to make it happen
without breaking things.
Another approach is to use CMU to export sites and users on the primary, copy
the data over to the secondary and import it there. This can be scripted to
run automatically on both ends, but isn't very relieable.
A better approach is to use clustering - for example with DRBD and Heartbeat.
With or without virtualization. If you check the list archives you'll see
that this has been discussed in the past. See [coba-e:05068] and
[coba-e:08772]. While a "do it yourself" approach is of course possible,
there is also a commercial software available which does this out of the box.
--
With best regards,
Michael Stauber