[LON-CAPA-admin] Snapshot backups --- stop loncapa service?

[Michael Dugdale]

Hello,

I’m in the process of upgrading our LON-CAPA servers (new OS, new LON-CAPA version) and while I’m at it, I decided it’s long past time to modernize our backup strategy.  To that end, I’m implementing a system using a bacula server and lvm snapshots.

For many services, it’s recommended to stop the service to flush any filesystem writes before taking the snapshot.  This ensures that the system isn’t backed up in an inconsistent state.  My current script does this by issuing a stop command (service loncapa stop), taking the snapshot and restarting loncapa (loncapa start).  At that point the backup is made of the snapshot with only a very short downtime.

My questions are: (a) is there a better way to flush any pending loncapa filesystem writes? Bringing the service down & up does mean a few minutes of unavailability that I’d like to trim and (b) is there any danger to this practice that I haven’t considered?

Thank you for sharing any insights you might have,

Cheers,
Michael Dugdale
Physics Department
John Abbott College
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.lon-capa.org/pipermail/lon-capa-admin/attachments/20190117/07354cc6/attachment.html>