![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Solo-Operating-1.png\")
I rely upon two key software packages to help me make this happen: (1) lxd, which I use to run all my containers and even some of my vm’s (I suspect Docker would work equally well); and (2) keepalived, which provides me with a ‘fake’ IP I can assign to different servers depending on whether they are operational or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am going to run this service with just two instances (i.e. one fail-over server). For now, both services are hosted in the same physical property and use the same power supply – so I do not have professional-grade redundancy (yet). I may add a third instance to this setup and even try to place that in a different physical location which would considerably improve robustness against power loss, internet outages etc. But that’s for the future – today I just finally have some limited albeit production-grade fail-over capability. I shall see if this actually makes my reliably better (as intended), or if the additional complexity just brings new problems that make things worse or at least no-better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A couple of additional details – I actually hot-backup both my Nextcloud server and a wordpress site I operate. As you can also see from the above image, I also deliberately change the COLOR of my Nextcloud banners (from blue to an unsubtle RED) just to help me realize something is up if my EPYC server goes down since I don’t always pay attention to phone notifications. I only perform a one-way sync, so any changes made to a backup instance will not be automatically regenerated on the primary server as\/when it comes back online after a failure. This is deliberate, to reduce making the setup too complicated (which could otherwise not go unpunished!). A pretty useful feature: my ENTIRE Nextcloud instance is hot-copied – links, apps, files, shares, sql daabase, ssl certs, user-settings, 2FA credentials etc. Other than the color of the banner ( and a pop-up notification), the instances are ‘almost identical’*. Lxd provides me with this level of redundancy as it copies everything when you use the refresh mode. Many other backup\/fail-over implemetations I have explored in the past do not provide the same level of easy redundency for a turn-key service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (*<\/strong>) Technically, the two instances can never be truly 100.0000000…% identical no matter how fast you mirror an instance. In my case, there is a user-configurable difference between the primary server and the backup server at the time of the fail-over coming online. I say user-cobfigurable because this is the time delay for copying the differences between server1 and server2. I configure this via the scheduling of the ‘lxc copy –refresh’ action. On a fast network, this can be as little as a minte or two, or potentially even faster. For my use-case, I accept the risk of losing a few minutes worth of changes, which is my maximum risk for the benefit of having a fail-over service. Accordingly, I run my sync script “less frequently” and as of now, it’s a variable I am playing with vs running a copy –refresh script constantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If anyone has any interest in more details on how I configure my fail-over service, I’ll be happy to provide details. Twitter: @OGSelfHosting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have operated a Nextcloud instance for several years. It has completely replaced DropBox, OneDrive and even Google Drive for me. However, my single-instances of Nextcloud have occasionally had downtime (power cuts, server issues and especially ‘administrator configuration fubars’). I have experimented with a Nextcloud failover service to try to improve mmy uptime, and it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,11,10,9,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-100daysofhomelab","category-jus-blogging","category-keepalived","category-lxd","category-ubuntu","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130,"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ogselfhosting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Solo-down-Skywalker-up.png\")