sbuchanan

Use System Center Orchestrator to Backup a Hosted WordPress

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I recently had some issues with my hosted WordPress (this blog) being hacked. So I wanted to start backing up a local copy and I did not want to do this all manually. A friend of mine (a fellow MVP Islam) also needed something like this for his blog because recently the hosting provider of his WordPress site deleted the entire thing!

WordPress on the backend consists of a database and a folder with the actual site files in it. I needed a way to back up the database and the site files. My WordPress database runs on MySQL. I needed a way to do a MySQL Dump of the database. Then the dump needed to be placed into a specific folder before downloading it. So to sum this up I need to somehow backup the MySQL database for my site, place this somewhere so it can be downloaded, delete the previous database file so that disk space is not being wasted before future dumps, then zip my blog files and download both the zip and MySQL Dump.

I was excited about this project because when I set out to accomplish I knew I would look to System Center first to help me out. Just my luck I am able to accomplish everything I need with System Center Orchestrator (SCORCH).

Here is a summary of how SCORCH will accomplish the task:

  • SCORCH will connect to the web server via SSH
  • SCORCH will issue a command that will remove any previous MySQL backups of my database
  • SCORCH will issue a MySQL command to back up the database to a specific folder
  • SCORCH will check for a previous .zip of my blog files and remove it if it is there
  • SCORCH will create a new .zip of my website files
  • SCORCH will connect to the web server via FTP and download the database and download the .zip of my blog

Before doing this you need a couple of things setup on your web server and depending on your host some of these options may not be available. Here is what you need:

  • You need a static IP so that you can access SSH remotely (Some hosts will give you a FQDN to connect to instead)
  • Then you need SSH turned on and configured (Make sure this is secured.)
  • Create a folder for your MySQL database backups
  • You need an FTP account setup to access your MySQL backups and the website files remotely

Ok now let’s jump into the actual setup of this in SCORCH.

Go download and deploy the FTP Integration Pack for SCORCH.

Here is the link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh295851.aspx

Register the integration pack and deploy it to your Runbook server. Once you have the FTP integration pack in your SCORCH go to the SCORCH Runbook designer and setup the FTP account for your host. This can be found under Options>>FTP.

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You just need to click Add and then input your FTP settings. Click OK when done and your FTP connection will be listed under Configurations. Click Finish.

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The next thing you need to do is create the Runbook. You will be using the System (Run SSH Command) and FTP (Download File) Activities.

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Go ahead and setup your Runbook like so:

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Build a SharePoint 2010 Test/Development Farm

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    In this post I am going to step through my process of spinning up a test/development SharePoint farm. In this scenario I decided to combine the testing and development on one farm. This will be a copy of the production farm on its own separate domain. I know there are posts on this out there already on this process but I decided to post about this anyway as I found some of the other posts hard to follow. With this post I want to spell out my own steps for my specific scenario in a clear concise format and hopefully this will help someone else at some point.

    The first thing that needs to be done is build the test/development domain and the servers that will be used in the new farm. Here is a list of what I would put in the test/development domain:

  • Domain Controller
  • DNS
  • Exchange Server
  • SQL Server
  • SharePoint servers (Web Front End Servers and any Application Servers you need.)

The Exchange server is not required. I wanted one in my test/development environment for some email testing. The production SharePoint farm consisted of 7 servers in but I went with 4 servers in the test/development environment. You do have the option to scale back on the amount of servers in the test/development farm and have a solid environment for development and testing. Ok. I will jump right into the steps now.

Deploy test/development SharePoint farm

I used a couple of tools to speed up this process. The first tool is called SPDocKit. (Thanks Sean Mcdonough for telling me about this.) I used SPDockit to go through and document every little detail of the production environment so that I knew what I was dealing with. This gave me a list of all web applications, site collections, the content databases that were being used, all services and service applications being used in the farm, any 3rd party solutions that were deployed as well as other any other data I wanted to know about such as email configurations.

I was able to take this data and create a plan for the test/development farm to ensure it matched the production farm as close as possible even with the amount of servers scaled back.

SPDockit can be found here: http://www.spdockit.com

The second tool that I used is the SPAutoInstaller. SPAutoinstaller is a tool that can be used to install and configure a SharePoint farm via scripts. It is easy to use and works well. This saves you time because you simply go and build out the script and input the configurations you need. Once you run the script it will completely build the farm for you. Now for me in this particular scenario I let the SPAutoInstaller do everything except for the site collections. I needed all the site collections that came over to be placed in their own content databases. That is why I skipped creation of the site collections within the script. These have to be restored in SQL as you will see later on in this post. I did however let the script create the web applications and all the managed paths that I needed.

The SPAutoInstaller can be found here: http://autospinstaller.codeplex.com and a great tutorial for the SPAutoInstaller can also be found here: http://www.wahidsaleemi.com/2011/11/autospinstaller-getting-prepared.

Please note that you need to go and deploy and custom solutions or any 3rd party solutions to your test/development farm. Now that we have the new environment spun up. Let’s move on to copying our site collections over from the production farm to the test/development farm.

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Deploy DPM Remote Administration console via SCCM

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In this post I am going to explain the process of deploying the DPM Remote Administration Console to IT admin computers via System Center Configuration Manager 2012. Following are the steps you will need to take to make this happen.

You will need somewhere to group your IT admin computers so that you can target the DPM Remote Administration console to them. Create an IT Admin Computers device collection in SCCM 12. This is what we will use to group the IT admin computers.

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Now we need to copy the contents from the DPM media onto your distribution point share. This will be the CCX86 and SCDPM folders.

NOTE: In my lab for this post I copied these to C:\App Deployments.

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OTHER INFO: As of right now you need to copy all the contents. I don’t know of the specific files that make up the remote administration console. If I track this down later I will update this blog post. If you need to save space you can copy one or the other folder and use it. CCX86 is for 32Bit computers and SCDPM is for 64Bit computers. If you know you will only deploy to 64Bit computers then get the SCDPM folder only.

The next step is to go and create a package for the DPM Remote Administration console.

In the Config Man console go to \Software Library\Overview\Application Management\Packages and create the new package.

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The create package wizard will come up. Go ahead and complete the highlighted fields in the following screenshot and click next.

NOTE: Remember for this post in my lab I copied the DPM software from the media to C:\App Deployments. This is the directory I am setting as my Source folder for this package. Your source folder path will be different.

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Chose standard program and click next.

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Here is where you need to put in the correct command line syntax to make sure it installs the DPM Remote Administration console vs. trying to install the full DPM product. Here is the syntax you will need to put in the Command line: field. See the following screenshot.

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System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook Published

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I am happy to announce the Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook has been published. I had the opportunity to be a  technical reviewer on this book. It will be a good resource for any Service manager admins out there. Here is the cover and the link to purchase it: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-System-Service-Manager-Cookbook/dp/1849686947

System Center 2012 Update Rollup 3 (UR3) Released

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System Center 2012 Update Rollup 3 (UR3) Released is available. There are updates to SCOM, SCSM, and SCDPM. There are allot of updates for SCDPM that fix issues with protecting SharePoint. So if you are protecting SharePoint you will want to apply this rollup soon. Here are the issues it fixes: Update Rollup 3 for … Read more