Backup server from home

[Phil w]

Hi folks.
Wondering if anyone can help I have an old cbalt raq kicking around at home and was wondering if there was a way to have it running as a backup server for my sites (following the recent draco issues.)
I'm not overly bothered about full sites on it just holding pages that could give a site temporary down message for each domain and a way to store email so it dosen't get bounced back.

Any ideas, advice, suggestions appreciated.

Cheers

Phil

[Vin DSL]

Why don't you just colo it?

[Phil w]

To be fair vin I could, just trying to save a couple of quid I don't expect a draco type issue on a regular basis, but even if I did colo I would still be asking the same question how do I get my mail and sites forwarded there when my jag server is unavailable ? is it just a matter of adding another mx entry for the mail that points to the backup ip ?

[Daniel_DBS]

For your mail, it is simple...

I would edit your current MX entrie(s) and put them at priority 0 instead of the default of 10. Once you do that, you add another MX entry pointing to the hostname of the other box with a priority of 10.

Once you do that and it is fully propagated, you should be good to go with the email. Now for the sites, I am not exactly sure, but I am sure it would most likely require a load balancer or IP trade off.

Hopefully someone else can come along with the answer for the sites.

-Daniel

[Gwaihir]

E-mail would probably not bounce anyway, but retry delivery for several days, at increasing intervals. That is: provided your DNS is up and running.

Given that the standard VPS setup hosts the DNS on the VPS, I think your main thing to do is set up your secondary DNS server at home instead of on your VPS. This takes very little bandwith or computing power (but uptime is everything), so it should work fine from that home setup of yours.

[Phil w]

Cheers for the suggestions folks, the mail is the main side I'm looking at but will probably try to go for a holding page as well incase of http faiure

[Rob]

For the sites you need to use DNS failover.

dnsmadeeasy provides such a service. You may want to think about looking at their Business package - will suit your needs perfectly.

In the new year we may use their service as well.

[Vin DSL]

Hey, do you guys prefer to shop @ Salvation Army or Goodwill?

Just curious...

[RickWeb]

LOL what all that about

[Gwaihir]

For the sites you need to use DNS failover.

dnsmadeeasy provides such a service. You may want to think about looking at their Business package - will suit your needs perfectly.

What they do is monitor your server, update your DNS record when your server is down (and again when it's back up), and make sure the TTL (time to live) in your DNS records is short in order to make that all work without a caching headache. Sure, they make that easy, but it's nothing Phil w couldn't setup at home himself.

[Phil w]

Cheers for the suggestions folks, they've been a great help.

Phil