Lsyncd is a tool I discovered a few weeks ago. It is a synchronization server based primarily on Rsync. It is a server daemon that runs on the “master” server, and it can sync / mirror any file or directory changes within seconds into your “slaves” servers, you can have as many slave servers as you want. Lsyncd is constantly watching a local directory and monitoring file system changes using inotify / fsevents.
By default lsyncd uses rsync to send the data over the slave machines, however there are other ways to do it. It does not require you to build new filesystems or blockdevices, and does not harm your server I/O performance.
With lsyncd, you can have your web servers constantly syncronized with the same information on each one if you decide to load balancing using Nginx for example. Now I will show you How to install & configure Lysncd on CentOS & Ubuntu Linux.
Hardware and Software Requirements
Software requirements for CentOS
yum -y install lua lua-devel pkgconfig gcc asciidoc
Software requirements for Ubuntu
apt-get update && apt-get install -y lua5.1 liblua5.1-dev pkg-config rsync asciidoc
Install lsyncd on CentOS
yum install lsyncd service lsyncd start chkconfig lsyncd on mkdir /var/log/lsyncd
Install lsyncd on Ubuntu
apt-get install lsyncd
mkdir /var/log/lsyncd
mkdir /etc/lsyncd
Configure Lsyncd service
On CentOS
nano -w /etc/lsyncd.conf
On Ubuntu
nano -w /etc/lsyncd/lsyncd.conf.lua
On both CentOS and Ubuntu, paste this content inside the lsyncd.comf file:
settings {
logfile = "/var/log/lsyncd/lsyncd.log",
statusFile = "/var/log/lsyncd/lsyncd-status.log",
statusInterval = 10
}
-- Slave server configuration
sync {
default.rsync,
source="/var/www/",
target="IP:/var/www/",
rsync = {
compress = true,
acls = true,
verbose = true,
owner = true,
group = true,
perms = true,
rsh = "/usr/bin/ssh -p 22 -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no"
}
}
Important: you have to replace the variables ‘source’ with your real source path, and target with the real server IP and destination path. You may also need to tweak the rsh variable if you use another port different than 22.
Generate the SSH public keys
ssh-keygen -t rsa
Once it has completed, you will have 2 new files in ~/.ssh/ id_rsa and id_rsa.pub
cat ~/.ssh/ id_rsa.pub
Then copy the text content into your slave server and paste it inside this file:
nano -w ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Test SSH connectivity
From the master server, ssh into each slave server, it may ask you to accept the key, just say “yes” and it will allow you to ssh into each slave without asking for root password.
Testing Lsyncd
Start the lsyncd service by running:
/etc/init.d/lsyncd start
Check that is is runnig ok:
/etc/init.d/lsyncd status
Add some files into /var/www directory and then check on the other server, as well as watching the log with tail:
tail -f /var/log/lsyncd/lsyncd.log
Other way to test it:
Open two ssh sessions, one for the master an the other for each slave, on all the slaves run this command:
watch ls -alh /var/www
On the master server, try adding a big file into /var/www and at the same time keep an eye on the slave servers. If sync is working fine, within seconds you will notice new file changes with watch command on each slave.
Read more information about Lsyncd
Article Number: 438
Posted: Wed, Oct 31, 2018 2:49 PM
Last Updated: Wed, Oct 31, 2018 2:49 PM
Online URL: http://kb.ictbanking.net/article.php?id=438