I am an accomplished technician at a medium-sized business with medium NT server experience. It seems as though our mail server is going down every 3 months or so because of virus or a-bends or other unknown hardware reasons. Still, our Exchange admin is reluctant or unskilled in clustering our server to another server ready to work should an emergency arise. The restoration of the OS, the reinstallation of Exchange and restoration of the mail store from backup is the usual procedure for fixinga downed server here (sad I know). How would I create a smaller server that I could have ready to implement when (not if) the mail server dies? I have a decent spare PIII 833 with 256MB RAM, a 20GB HD and is WinNT compliant. I have access to all theserver software, installation disks and administrative privileges. I would rather the server not even be attached to the network during it’s installation and wait for the right time to connect to our network. Our current mail server is on WinNT4 Server SP6; Exchange server 5.5 SP3; has 20 shares; and a 17.2 GB HD with 8.6 GB used. This server I would create would be just temporary enough to serve our clients until the real deal is fixed. What would be the best way of configuring this server to be ready and how could I update the mail store every week to keep it up to date?
