I’ve been working on making my LowEnd empire of cheap VPS systems more reliable and better-managed.  This has ranged from keeping better track of config info to automating with Ansible to using high availability.

Tonight I was working on a couple MySQL-based web sites and remember a tutorial series I did a little over two years ago entitled “How to Setup a Highly Available WordPress Site From Scratch”.

This six-parter walks through setting up two VPS systems, configuring MariaDB and replication, using DRBD and OCFS2 for filesystem replication, and tying it all off with round-robin DNS.

And it still works!  Just configured DRBD tonight on a pair of Hetzner Cloud systems using their volume storage.  Here’s a couple tips if you’re working with Hetzner Cloud.

First, setup and use private networking for replication to get better speed.

Second, the volume is presented as something like /dev/sdb.  Do the following:

1. unmount it.  It’ll be mounted as /mnt/something

2. comment it out in /etc/fstab

2. nuke it:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1000000 count=10

Make a new primary partition:

gparted /dev/sdb
mklabel gpt
mkpart primary ext2 1MiB 100%

…and you should be good to go.   You can just use /dev/sdb in your r0.res.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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