Network Management

In order to restore a failover airwave back to being a failover. The process is to restore the nightly backup in the /watcher directory on the fialover Airwave to make it a failover AMP again correct?

 

What happens if I don't have a /watcher directory on the failover Airwave and it is currently acting as a failover Airwave?

In my failover Airwave, the /var/airwave-backup/ directory has nightly_data00x.tar.gz backups in it though but like I said no watcher directory but I have a watched_amps directory

I am using AMP version 7.5.6

 

On another customer's Airwave:

My other failover AMP which is version 7.5.5 has a watcher directory.

 

ANy ideas?

 

 

 

 

 

I would exclude all backups in the main /var/airwave-backup directory since they get over-ridden when the system is acting as an AMP.  Both 7.5.5 and 7.5.6 should behave in the same way having a watcher folder (this folder is created on the fly when the AMP is being converted into an AMP).  Not having a 'watcher' folder leads me to believe that the failover event didn't happen, or that we're possibly looking at the AMP and not the Failover.  I'm going to try a quick reproduction in the lab to make sure.  Will update again after a test run.

Just checked on the test run.  During the failover event, the Failover AMP generates a backup on the fly: /var/airwave-backup/watcher/nightly_data.tar.gz; this is done prior to restoring the AMP backup.  The size of the failover backup is typically very small since the Failover AMP shouldn't have much data.  If you're unable to find this backup, it's worthwhile to open a support case.

I can probably safely assume that the failover event never happened hence why their is no /watcher folder.

 

I will have to request a maintenance window with the customer to validate this.

 

The reason I ask is because we have developped a script to offload the AMP backup files 1 time a week to another server.

I would like to back up the failover backup so that I can restore it as a failover....

The problem you'll run into is that the failover backup is created on the fly, so any script would have to react to that event.  Another approach, since the failover doesn't collect any extra data besides AMP up/down status, take a backup of the failover immediately once you have it watching all the AMPs you want it to watch.

 

One way to do this would be to force nightly maintenance to run at that time:

# nightly_maintenance

When you run the nightly maintenance script, the new backup generated will be /var/airwave-backup/nightly_data001.tar.gz

 

This backup would serve as your failover backup until you make any changes on the failover.  Going the scripted route would be doing extra work that's unnecessary.

Revisiting this topic and read my initial post, wow I was confusing :P

 

What we are doing is the following:

 

Primary AMP server -> backing up /var/airwave-backup/nightly_data001.tar.gz

Failover AMP server -> backing up /var/airwave-backup/watcher/nightly_data.tar.gz

 

Therefore in the event of a failure of both servers, we can restore both very easily, does this make sense?

 

 

 

Your Failover AMP server backup would fail.  Remember, the Failover AMP's backup in /watcher is only present after a Failover event has happened.  So before that, the file to backup would just be of /var/airwave-backup/nightly_data001.tar.gz on the Failover AMP.  

And when backing up the Failover AMP, you don't need to take a new backup of the Failover AMP everyday.  To save your disk space, you can just take the backup once you have the Failover AMP setup as desired.  If disk space is unlimited, go ahead and take infinite backups of the Failover AMP (you'll note that the size of Failover AMP backups is very small compared to an AMP backup, so any Failover AMP backups that come back larger will have been post Failover).

Good information.

 

I know that in the watcher directory, the file contained there is to restore the failover AMP as a failover AMP.

What happens if the failover AMP does not have a file in that watcher directory but only the regular nightly backup file.

 

To restore this server, I would need to restore that particular backup correct?

Correct.  The Failover will have regular backups in /var/airwave-backup until the Failover event.  So the regular backups that are made prior to the Failover event will be the ones for the Failover server.  After the Failover event, the backup in /var/airwave-backup/watcher would be used for the restoring the Failover AMP, while the /var/airwave-backup files eventually become that of the failed AMP (it takes 4 days to age out the original Failover backups from /var/airwave-backup which is why the backup in /var/airwave-backup/watcher was created).

Hi,

 

Here's a scenario:

Server 1 is master, Server 2 is backiup.

One day, Server 1 is taken offline to change ram, server 2 will be the new master, right? ___

Server 1 was rebooted and brought online.

Thus, Server 1 would be the new backup and server 2 will remain as themaster, right? ___

 

In this case, should we leave Server 1 to be the backup or it is recommended to swing it back as the new master? ___

 

Terminology gets mixed up, so lets call it server 1, server 2

To start: server 1 = AMP, server 2 = failover

In your proposed scenario, server 1 = down, server 2 = AMP after failover

The next part depends on preference, but ideally, most customers would bring server 1 back online, and then restore it to being the active AMP by taking a backup from server 2 and restoring.  After that, they'd use the /var/airwave-backup/watcher backup to restore on server 2 to return the server to failover.

 

But it's perfectly okay to change and let server 2 remain AMP while bringing up server 1 as failover.  That is a good option as well in which case you can take the watcher backup from server 2 to restore on server 1, or go through the setup as you would since it doesn't take that much effor to setup a failover server.

After restoring the watcher backup from server 2 to put in server 1, server 1 will remain as backup until a failover is initiated, right?

Yes.  If you take server 2's original Failover backup and restore it onto recovered server 1, then server 1 would be the Failover.  One thing to make sure of is the IP address of the servers.  Because you may have to delete the watched AMP entry and replace it for the new IP on the Failover server.