Redundent Backups and Database Replication

[hartwelltv]

I have two copies of my vbulletin message boards on 2 different servers.

I use managed DNS, so in the case of a server failure, I can switch from one server to another, almost instantly, by simply changing the IP address in my 2 managed DNS accounts. (I use two in case one goes down).

This may sound a bit paranoid to some, but I have lost a lot of traffic and money due to server failures. I don't want this kind of thing to happen again.


My question is about the slave db settings in vbulletin, can I simply add the settings for my backup db in there, in order to connect externally to my backup database (which is on a different server)?

Would this have any negative performance impacts on my site?

Or would it be better to just use an external application to sync the db's every so often?

[Wayne Luke]

The slave database settings in vBulletin are not for failover protection. You need to do that on the MYSQL server level. If you set a slave server in vBulletin, most data reads come from the slave after being replicated from the master.

[hartwelltv]

Any recommendations on methods or scripts that can be run to accomplish this?
(db sync from one server to another)

[Wayne Luke]

MySQL has replication built in.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication.html

They talk about switching masters for failover here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/...ns-switch.html