Abstract:
After initiating the automated circulation service in the Main library of University of Ruhuna the problem of assuring the security and accuracy of data has become a major problem. These daily influxes of valuable data mainly include circulation data and library material related entities of the library. To provide a secure and accurate data service, the library need to have a good backup service. At the beginning this was managed by a schedule back-up via a routine cron deamon on a Debian (Linux) system to copy the database into several back-up media. But this result a risk of either loss or accuracy of data in the library database, since there is a time delay between backup taking times. In this paper we present the systems administration functions designed and implemented by the UoR Library by setting up a replication server which is capable of maintaining an identical copy of the original master database down to each millisecond of modification for the MySQL database used by the Information System of UoR (ISURu), a derived product of Koha (University of Ruhuna, 2005). The replication server acts as a slave system which becomes a master at an event of a failure with a fully updated database which is identical to the original one. Later the system was fine-tuned by adding the service Hearbeat which is capable of switching between master and slave servers automatically in an event of a failure. The combined effects of these newly updated features provide capacity to assure the security and accuracy of data in the automated library environment of University of Ruhuna.
