Here's a setup I use for totally pain-free Solr replication, and allowing you to switch masters/slaves quickly without messing with config files.

Add this to solrconfig.xml

<requestHandler name="/replication" class="solr.ReplicationHandler" >
  <str name="maxNumberOfBackups">1</str>
  <lst name="master">
        <str name="enable">${enable.master:false}</str>
        <str name="replicateAfter">startup</str>
        <str name="replicateAfter">commit</str>
        <str name="confFiles">solrconfig.xml,schema.xml,stopwords.txt,elevate.xml</str>
        <str name="commitReserveDuration">00:00:10</str>
    </lst>
    <lst name="slave">
        <str name="enable">${enable.slave:false}</str>
        <str name="masterUrl">http://${replication.master}:8983/solr/corename</str>
        <str name="pollInterval">00:00:20</str>
        <str name="compression">internal</str>
        <str name="httpConnTimeout">5000</str>
        <str name="httpReadTimeout">10000</str>
     </lst>
</requestHandler>

Substitute "corename" with your actual core name.

Now create your master core with this command (substitute MASTER_IP_ADDRESS as appropriate):

curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=CREATE&name=corename&instanceDir=corename&schema=schema.xml&config=solrconfig.xml&dataDir=data&property.enable.master=true&property.enable.slave=false&property.replication.master=MASTER_IP_ADDRESS"

And this for your slaves:

curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=CREATE&name=corename&instanceDir=corename&schema=schema.xml&config=solrconfig.xml&dataDir=data&property.enable.master=false&property.enable.slave=true&property.replication.master=MASTER_IP_ADDRESS"

Now when you need to promote a slave to a master, just do this on the new master:

curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=UNLOAD&core=corename" && curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=CREATE&name=corename&instanceDir=corename&schema=schema.xml&config=solrconfig.xml&dataDir=data&property.enable.master=true&property.enable.slave=false&property.replication.master=NEW_MASTER_IP_ADDRESS"

And this on all slaves:

curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=UNLOAD&core=corename" && curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=CREATE&name=corename&instanceDir=corename&schema=schema.xml&config=solrconfig.xml&dataDir=data&property.enable.master=false&property.enable.slave=true&property.replication.master=NEW_MASTER_IP_ADDRESS"

Copy these commands and do a search and replace on "corename" for your actual core.

If you have a cssh cluster setup, you can update all slaves in one fell swoop.

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