Cold Spare?

[bigdessert]

We are wanting to put in a cold spare system at a remote location. This location is 6 hours away and if they go down it would not be good. I have live backups done daily.

I am thinking of putting a cold spare up there. The cold spare would be slightly different hardware so a config restore will reassign nics. There is also the job of keeping the cold spare up to date so the restore would work.

Devices are in router mode.

My thought is to have a cold spare configured with static ISP IP on external and a different internal IP than the core router. This would then allow the device to get updates and allow me to connect to it and restore the backup.

After restoring the backup I would assume all that would have to be done is to find out what NIC got internal and what NIC got external.

Do you think this setup will work?

[sky-knight]

Restoring the backup will actually break the installation entirely until an interface refresh is performed. That process is known to knock out boxes entirely. (Not always, but happens to me every time it's critical)

The only way I know to make this work every time, is to manually configure the cold spare with enough information to handle the critical functions of Internet delivery. Leave the filters at a minimal level. Then you can just leave it connected to both the LAN and the WAN (on an extra static of course). If the primary goes down, you just remote into the "cold spare" and change the LAN IP address.

Then go about fixing the primary box.