Server Maintenance

This is one of those questions that gets my favorite answer - it all depends. If you bought a white-box server with who-knows components, then you might run into problems with overheating of the CPU or hard drives. But if you bought a good-qualityname-brand server such as Dell, HP, IBM, etc., etc., then it should be configured to run continuously until doomsday (theoretically at least). Of course, over time, some hardware component may fail, thus bringing the server down, but other than that, there shouldn't be any problem with a server running continuously for months or even years at a time without ever being brought down for any length of time. This is, of course PROVIDED that you run it in a relatively clean and reasonably climate-controlled atmosphere so that the minimum and maximum environmental restrictions for the server are not exceeded on any regular basis.

Hope this helps!

Yes in theory you should be able to run the server continously, and if the server is merely a file server this seems to hold true, however if you are running applications then most likely your server resources will gradually be dimished. Server Maintenance is a lot like desktop maintenance you need to perform disk clean ups and defrags to keep system running at its peak performance. It has been running for 3 months now is network performance as good now as when system was initially started or have you noticed a slight slow down?? If you notice diminished performance then the server is due for a restart to flush its caches and memory. As for disk diskkeeper is a good choice for keeping the HDD optimized and uses relatively small resources. The other thing that you want to do is make sure you have a current ERD disk (Use backup to create this floppy and choose to make the restore dir). A backup device i.e. tape or DVD is also a good decision.

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