bbonamin's questions

I've recently been put in charge of a Ubuntu server in the Linode platform.

This webserver is running a production Rails application with a MySQL database.

I need to ssh into it to download a copy of the database to perform further development locally.

I've read that Linode requires to shut down the node before letting you reset the root password from the rescue tab in the manager. Is the "Shut Down" button in the dashboard safe to use and restart a production webserver? Won't the server lose any data? (I'm asking this because I'm used to Amazon AWS, where servers are not persistent)

Is there other way to access the server via SSH within the Linode Manager?

I have a problem with a LTO 3 Tape Drive. I'm using Brightstor ArcServe Backup software with Windows Server 2003.

Sometimes, the scheduled backups will stop working and going into "devices" inside this software reveals that the Tape Drive is offline. The only way to make it work again is uninstalling the Tape Drive's driver and rebooting the server: Windows then auto recognizes and installs the required drivers and the Tape Drive works again.

Has anyone ever encountered a similar problem?

Once in a while I would go to http://aws.amazon.com/console and manually right click my EBS volume and create a snapshot.

This is kind of tedious and I would forget sometimes. Is it possible to automate this actions and say, make a daily or weekly snapshot?

I'm using a Windows Server instance.

Our city is having a very public event soon (data harvesting for public spots available in the city hall) which required our company to create a form application to submit curriculums and some personal data. About 5-10 thousands of users are expected to submit data the first week because of the publicity the event is receiving and previous experiences of our client.

I've had good experiences using Amazon EC2 for small applications so I'm planning to launch an instance specialized in input/output, expecting massive data inputs.

The application is either going to run on IIS + MySQL or Tomcat + MySQL under Windows server.

I would really appreciate some thoughts and suggestions for testing and configuring this web server for stress and concurring users to avoid experiencing downtime and lost connections. I have little experience handling this amount of users so I'm a beginner with this kind of tools.

PROGRESS:

• I've found a very good starting tutorial for Jmeter in Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/3453772)
• I've also found useful explanation on the results of the test in this blog

In my opinion these two resources make it easier to understand jmeter besides the official documentation.