Sychnosizing web servers

[richclever]

Does anyone know an easy way to synchronize/mirror a web server with a local server. I have Plesk on both the remote server and local machine, and desperately need to have a live version of my portal on our local server. Also, when things are changed on either server I need them both to bring themselves up to date.

Any help much appreciated

Richard

 

[HeyZuess]

Maybe rsync:

http://master.samba.org/rsync/

you might have to manually set it up - know nothing about Plesk.

 

[richclever]

Yes, I thought about Rsync too. Had problems getting it working though. Do you know of a good source of documentation?

 

[HeyZuess]

I think their website is probably the best resource for documentation available.

 

[billr1]

We use rsync for syncing a master web server to two slave servers. It is run from cron every 10 minutes. Something like this:
rsync -az -e ssh --delete /var/

http://www/html

server2.my.domain:/var/

http://www/html

will sync the entire html tree. To just do a subset, specify the starting point, e.g.:
rsync -az -e ssh --delete /var/

http://www/html/myweb

server2.my.domain:/var/

http://www/html/myweb

The -a flag means use archive mode (i.e. copy symbolic links as links), the z flag means use compression when transferring files, the --delete flag means delete any files on the remote server that are no longer present on the master server, and the -e ssh flag means use ssh to contact the remote rsync slave, rather than the default remote command executor (which I believe is rsh).

Note that you have to have ssh (or rsh) configured so that the remote system does not prompt for a password. Generally this means an entry in a .rhosts or .shosts file.

 

[MrTom]

there's a decent introduction to rsync at

http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/Administration/Rsync/page1.html

 

[richclever]

Will Rsync sychronize both ways. I need it to keep both my local server and my remote server up to date. Data will change on both, and I don't want to lose data on either machine.