Re: [cobalt-users] Backups and Restore for Raq

["Carrie Bartkowiak" <ravencarrie@xxxxxxxx>]

> The point is, The backup solutions DOES NOT WORK as it should. its a
real
> pain in the a** to create 200 sites and their users and then restore
their
> sites even if you knew the sequence in which the sites were created.
It took
> us a week to restore 50 site, just think of 200 sites

I think what it is, is that Cobalt's idea of "backing up sites" is
quite different than what we out here in the real-use world expect it
to be.

A week to restore 50 sites? Egads. Learn to use the shell tools. Other
than tarring up the sites and subsequently untarring them later (which
you could write a script to do), it should take you an hour... a few
at the most... to setup 50 sites and their users.
With the shell tools you can...
create sites (specifying everything... ip addy, features to enable,
web aliases, etc.)
create users (and all features to enable/disable, quotas, fp password,
etc.)
delete sites
delete users
suspend sites and/or users and unsuspend them

The only thing the shell tools don't do (that I can tell, anyway) is
update users and/or sites... for example add aliases to either when
the site/user is already in existence. But there are other files on
the RaQ that will do that, just modify those files and restart the
appropriate service.

Rev. Leonard, I keep a list of what a listing of /home/sites spits out
at me specifically for this reason - so if something happens, I'll
*know* what site was in what siteXX folder. You can also get a same
type of list for users (and which site they belong to) by doing an
ls -la /home/sites/*/users/* > userlisting.txt
This won't show you forwards, aliases, vacation messages, etc.
though - with a little fiddling you can grab those out of other system
files. Backup the "/etc/shadow -" file in order to have their
passwords.
I posted a command to find out what sites have majordomo lists set up
(posted last week sometime) - you could also output this to a file or
make sure you back it up in whatever solution you decide upon. (It
will list out all sites that have lists, config files for each, etc.
and let you know exactly what to backup.)

As with writing HTML, I am convinced that doing it by hand is the best
way to make sure it gets done correctly. Time-consuming, sure - but if
you automate it with a few scripts and then use the shell tools to add
the sites and users back, it's not *too* incredibly painful.

CarrieB