MySQL Backup and Recovery

If your site manages it's data with MySQL, then you obviously need to make sure the data is safe. In this blog post, I will show how to create a daily backup automatically. I will also show a continuous data protection plan for MySQL databases. This blog post uses the previous backup server configured in my Secure Backup & Recovery with rsnapshot, rssh and OpenSSH article.

Secure Backup & Recovery with rsnapshot, rssh and OpenSSH

Overview

Wee all need to backup our machines. But we also need to keep the data private and the backup procedure secured. In UNIX and Linux machines, we need to run the backup operation as root in order to read everything on the machines. But allowing remote connections as the root user is not exactly a good idea. So how to we proceed? We use rsnapshot(1) and rssh(1) together with OpenSSH to secure the whole process. Here's how to do it on CentOS 6.

In case you're running a heterogeneous network, please note that I've successfully configured this process on FreeBSD, PC-BSD, RedHat, Ubuntu, AIX and Solaris servers.

In this example, our backup server is called backup.company.com and is running CentOS 6 while the clients are :

1. The OpenLDAP server alice.company.com that we configured in several other blog posts and running CentOS 6.
2. A workstation machine called charlie.company.com running PC-BSD 9.0 (i.e. FreeBSD 9.0 :)

HOWTO : OpenLDAP 2.4 Backup & Recovery on CentOS 6.2

This blog post will explain how to backup and restore our OpenLDAP 2.4 server. This is goal number nine.

1. Install OpenLDAP 2.4.
2. Configure Transport Layer Security (TLS).
3. Manage users and groups in OpenLDAP.
4. Configure pam_ldap to authenticate users via OpenLDAP.
5. Use OpenLDAP as sudo's configuration repository.
6. Use OpenLDAP as automount map repository for autofs.
7. Use OpenLDAP as NFS netgroup repository again for autofs.
8. Use OpenLDAP as the Kerberos principal repository.
9. Setup OpenLDAP backup and recovery.
10. Setup OpenLDAP replication.

The Maintenance chapter in the OpenLDAP Administrator's Guide on this topic is not very explicit. We hope this blog post will be more helpful.

MacOS X 10.7 Time Machine Backup to FreeBSD Server with Netatalk

UPDATE : This documentation still works, but it uses netatalk version 2 and is more complex than using version 3. Please consider using this documentation using netatalk version 3 instead. 

If you backup your MacOS X 10.6 machine to a netatalk server, then you may have found that MacOS X 10.7 cannot backup to the same machine. Apparently, the major reason why it's now broken is a lack of « replay cache » which was introduced in AFP 3.3. So what you need to do is upgrade netatalk to version 2.2.x.

UPDATE : I've successfully this setup with MacOS X 10.8 and 10.9.

Let's configure a FreeBSD machine to serve as a Time Machine target for MacOS X 10.7. I'm using FreeBSD 8.2 as this is the production version. If you prefer using a Linux machine, then take a look at this blog post by Steffen L. Norgren.