asyd.net

As you may noticed, my web site was down for almost a week. The problem doesn't come from my server, but from my provider.. (and my server is still down :). Though, I used my backup to restore all my services in another server, and now I can tell I'm very happy with my Solaris server layout. I use pkgsrc to build softwares (like apache2, php, mailman, etc), all my public services running in a zone which use a logical partition (SVM/softpartition, and now ZFS) as root. The pkgsrc binary are install in a logical partition too (/usr/pkg). The zone's filesystem is backup every week via a dump filesystem (ufsdump or zfs send).

Using the following layout, my most difficult point to restore my server was the building of pkgsrc. I even use this occasion to upgrade pkgsrc (2005Q4 to 2006Q2). Once the softwares I need was built, I create a new zone, install it, and finally restore my zone's dump into the new system. And then, all stuff work perfectly (since data and configuration - but not binaries - was in the zone dump)