Testing failure: Raspbian

Programmer art, just say no.

If you’ve had a look at the Raspbian website today you’ll have noticed the big red !!!FAILOVER TEST!!! logo at the top right corner. That’s because today is officially unimportant for Raspberry Pi, whereas in three weeks time it will be officially very important. Historically Christmas day sees our highest traffic loads as people unwrap their new Raspberry Pis and try them out. The most critical things for us to worry about are some of the educational and getting started resources on the website, and Raspbian and the mirror director so people can download new packages for their existing Raspberry Pis.

The majority of the website has a relatively small amount of data, so pulling an image from backup and redeploying is a relatively quick operation. Raspbian however is a bit harder – it’s a big image with around 4TB of data.

So we picked today to schedule a failover of Raspbian from it’s normal dedicated server to a VM hosted in the Raspberry Pi cloud. This is aiming to check

• Is the failover server up to date and does it work?
• Is the failover setup fast enough to keep up with the traffic load?
• Does every service successfully fail over?

So far we’ve had a very smooth operation, we’ve had to add a couple of missing packages that had been overlooked during setup and testing, but basically we did a DNS flip and the whole site moved over.

If you like to discover that your disaster recovery system works before you have a disaster, have a look at our Managed Services or get in touch – sales@mythic-beasts.com.