Reply To: daily, weekly, monthly tasks
by
angry_white_male
·
about 18 years, 11 months ago
In reply to daily, weekly, monthly tasks
Not really… I sat down and made my own preventative maintenance (PM) checklist/schedule (with feedback from the rest of the IT dept).
Mostly has to do with weekly server reboots, inspecting and clearing out log files, temp files, making sure backups are working, AV software is up to date and your entire network is free of viruses, approving OS patches in MS SUS, that I get a list of hires/fires from HR on a regular basis, the occasional ethical hack, random backup restore, making sure hot swap drives aren’t dead, physically checking around for safety related things like fire hazards – loose cables – condensation, making sure the AC is at the right temp/humidity, that the fire suppression system has been maintained by the vendor and is “locked and loaded”, changing wireless SSID’s and encryption keys, checking for disk space utilization, tape drive head cleaning, server time syncronization, clean up “shared” network drives, defrag drives, taking daily tapes out of rotation for replacement, do some security audits – check for unauthorized machines on the network (i.e., someone’s laptop from home), run a packet sniffer – look for anything out of the ordinary, blowing dust out of the servers (hopefully you don’t have a dusty server room), changing the combination to the lock on the server room door, replacing UPS batteries on a regular schedule, etc.
How often you do it is up to you – some stuff gets done weekly – monthly – quarterly – annually, how many servers you have, the size of your network and what your schedule allows. Once you have a routine down pat, it should only take a few minutes per server – which can mean a several hours per week. I usually schedule this stuff in Outlook for myself once a week towards the end of the day going into dinner time, but in reality workload often trumps preventative maintenance… so try not to take on too many project at the expense of giving your servers and network the TLC they require. Thankfully Win2003 doesn’t require as much maintenance as WinNT – but you should be careful not to let your PM’s slip too far behind.
One bit of advice is not to do PM’s when you have plans for the evening/weekend – so I generally do them on Wednesdays so that if something does go horribly wrong, don’t have to cancel plans or wait til the vendor’s tech support punches in on Monday to fix it. People would rather see you fixing it the next day, than having to wait all weekend.