Standalone mode

Normally, the pull_and_push command runs on the master and it will only succeed if updates happen on both the master machine and the backup machine. If the backup machine is going to be down for an extended period of time, the master can be configured to continue to accept updates by creating the file /etc/cvmfs/runstandalone (either empty or with any contents). Then pull_and_push on the master will continue to attempt to push updates to the backup, but if there are any errors on the backup they will be ignored.

NOTE: Care must be taken to not allow the backup machine to become the master before /etc/cvmfs/runstandalone is removed and the backup is caught up to date.

The add-repository and remove-repository commands use a different mechanism. For them, use the -h command line option to only add or remove a repository on the current half of the machine pair. You will need to make sure that the same command is run on the other machine at another time.