Mirror, Mirror on the…
I mentioned the other day that I am working on some new servers at work. I am replacing one ancient web server with two modern ones — staging and production. I need this two servers to be basically identical, but I wasn’t looking forward to configuring everything by hand on both of them.
My solution was pretty simple. I built up the staging server, got everything working, and then today yanked out one of the mirrored drives and swapped in a blank one from the production server. I told that one to rebuild the mirror, popped in the drive with data into the other server, and told that one to rebuild the mirror as well. Now I have two identically configured servers. All I have to do is change some network settings, and I am good to go.
It might not be for the faint of heart, but worked great for me.