Hi Gang,
I thought I would share with you a way that you
can recover your mail server in 15 minutes. I administer several Imail
servers, each with about 2000 domains. Average traffic is about 40,000
in/out emails per day/ per mail server. I run declude AV and Junkmail on
all. When a server goes down, I just can't afford to set up a new
server, restore from tape, bla bla bla.... I've give you the steps
below, so you can implement this in your own environment if you feel it's
useful to you. I use this to method to backup multiple mail servers, you
could use it for just one, or as many as you like. You only need ONE
failover server to backup several production servers.
Step1:
Set up a new mail server, name it "SPARE-MAIL", install Imail on it. Keep it on
the same version as all your other production servers. Set it up just
like it were a real production mail server, with one exception. Keep one
hard drive separate, and make it it's own partition, I call mine "Z"
drive. It should be big enough to hold the M:\Imail folders from every
production server. (I install imail to M:\Imail\)
Step2:
Get "robocopy.exe" if you don't already have
it. Create a bat file on \\SPARE-MAIL to copy the Imail folders
from every production server to this server. Using the /MIR will allow
you to mirror the directory structure. Schedule this to run as often as
you like, I run it a couple times a day.
Step3:
Create a scheduled task on every production
mail server, to write it's registry to \\SPARE-MAIL
********************
********************
Schedule this to run as often as you like, I run
it a couple times a day. The more you run it, the more up to date your
mail server will be if you have to recover one.
Step4:
Back up \\spare-mail\z$ to
scsi array, or, to tape as often as you like for "real" backups, in case you
need to restore a mailbox from a couple days ago, and to get backups off
site.
Step5:
Test your plan, here are the steps to do if a
mail server dies. And if a mail server really does die, don't waste time
trying to recover the dead server, it will only make your life worse.
You can re-write these instructions below to make them more specific, so you
can give them to any "somewhat" technical person in your staff, so they can do
this if you are unavailable.
- Shut down the dying mailserver (for example,
MAXMAIL003)
- Stop all Imail services on server Spare-mail
- Rename m:\IMail to m:\IMailbackup
- Copy Folder Z:\MaxMail003 to the M: drive
- Rename the directory:
m:\MaxMail003 --->
m:\Imail
- Create the following
directory:
M:\Imail\spool (or where ever you keep your spool
folder)
- Copy the following
directory:
M:\IMailbackup\spool\web ---> M:\Imail\spool\web
- Run the
file:
Z:\Registry\maxmail003\imail_backup.reg
- Put MAXMAIL003's IP on the server and rename the
server
- Reboot
Poof! You are back up and running.
90% of your users probably won't notice a difference, except for the ones who
store mail on the server. Now you have time to go see if you can get to
the hard drive of the old mail server. If you can, just take their old
main.mbx file, copy it to the new mail server as restore.mbx.
Hope you find this helpful. If you have
questions, or see something that can be done to improve the plan, let me
know. I've tested this a few times, and it works. I've only had to
do it once in a real world scenerio, but it saved my butt, big
time....
Tom
