Questions tagged [best-practices]

Questions asking for best practices in a given field. Be aware, that sometimes there might be no generally accepted best practices, in which case the question is likely to be closed for being subjective.

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4k views

Server OS on an internal USB flash drive - is this standard practice today?

While chatting with a sysadmin colleague of mine about setting up a small server for me, I found out something interesting - most servers these days apparently contain an internal USB port which can ...
0 votes
1 answer
326 views

Allow caching of share - roaming profiles - WS2016

I have a WS2016 that is running roaming profiles for users. Within the SMB file share, the option: "Allow caching of share" is enabled and was enabled by accident upon creation. There are already ...
0 votes
1 answer
55 views

How to react on vulnerability scanning?

We noticed that our server is being scanned for standard vulnerabilities like publically exposed myphpadmin and other common security configuration mistakes / failures. What is best locations to ...
-2 votes
1 answer
1k views

Should I open Active Directory to public Internet? [closed]

I am a network administrator and my windows support partner recommended to open active directory to public internet. reason is dns is configured on active directory with same server. But I never done ...
4 votes
2 answers
10k views

Which symbols to avoid when naming AD DS groups?

can somebody point out to the symbols which is better not to use when naming AD DS groups? I want to have some explanations/links to documentation on why those should not be used. For example Windows ...
1 vote
0 answers
3k views

Backup best practice with lsyncd: delete or not delete

I have set up a backup of some working folders of a server (running with Centos 7) to a remote disk using lsyncd. It's great, however I'm quite undecided about what to do about file deletion: If I ...
8 votes
2 answers
4k views

How to plan an Active Directory domain rename without it killing me?

It's looking more and more like I'll have to rename my Active Directory domain. There is a well-known process for making this change, including some very good answers on Server Fault already (like ...
1 vote
0 answers
39 views

How to install hadoop reusable on a local network?

For a multi-node image cluster on an institute, we have sevaral laptops and machines and we want to create a hadoop cluster with hbase on the top for indexing the data/images. I have tried some VMare ...
0 votes
2 answers
106 views

FTP Server 'Netiquette'; Are fast and frequent Connect/Transfer/Disconnect session acceptable?

some code of mine is using a queue to upload files to an FTP server. When files get queued, a connection attempt is made and, if successful, files are uploaded. Once the queue is empty it disconnects ...
-1 votes
2 answers
3k views

Is it good practice to name an admin account 'admin' or 'administrator'?

I have seen on numerous occasions that organisations name their admin account anything but admin or administrator. Most often of course people in help desk would use their own account with different ...
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

puppet best practices: share variables among profiles

I'm using the roles&profiles approach for my current puppet project. The puppet best practices tell me: Expose all necessary profile parameters in the main class parameter list. Perform hiera ...
6 votes
4 answers
10k views

Docker: Run Cronjob for different Container

I am looking for best practices about running cronjobs for my php fpm container. Right now running: NGINX Container PHP FPM Container MySQL Container I now would love to have another Container ...
1 vote
2 answers
1k views

What is the downside of deleting an iptables rule as an attempt to check if it exists?

I want to add a rule using iptables, but only if it does not exist already. There's option -C which will allow us to check if a rule specification exists already. The option is described in this Q&...
2 votes
4 answers
20k views

Enabling Receive Side Scaling & IPsec Task Offload v2 on a Network Adapter

Running the Best Practice Analyzer on a Windows Server 2012 RTM (this virtual server runs on a hyper-v host), I receive two configuration warnings. Enable Receive Side Scaling (RSS) on a network ...
0 votes
0 answers
196 views

Use default `ubuntu` user to deploy an app or make separate users?

I have a Ruby on Rails app and use Capistrano to deploy it to the server. The deploy user and the user running the app is the same - the default ubuntu user. (this has sudo access: ubuntu ALL=(ALL) ...
-3 votes
1 answer
75 views

Accepted standards for incremental or differential backups

I need to choose software for network backup (this is not a software recommendation question). I wonder if there are accepted standards for incremental or differential backups, so different software ...
10 votes
5 answers
8k views

Nagios server best practices?

I run a medium-sized Nagios server. It monitors roughly 40 servers with 180 services currently and is only growing by the day. I migrated from an old Nagios setup that was configured in a very ...
35 votes
8 answers
34k views

Is it best practices to have separate login for a domain for domain admins?

I typically like to set up separate logins for myself, one with regular user permissions, and a separate one for administrative tasks. For example, if the domain was XXXX, I'd set up a XXXX\bpeikes ...
-2 votes
1 answer
159 views

What is the Industry Best Practice for Updating Dell Drivers ? [closed]

Is it ok to upgrade to latest drivers whenever we provide it to end-user ? or we should keep the Drivers with OS which has been shipped by Dell along with OS Kindly suggest if there is any document ...
5 votes
1 answer
153 views

What are the pros/cons of running Chef/Puppet at regular intervals?

I always worked where they used to run Puppet at regular intervals. So, distributing changes was easy and on the fly. In the new team, they frown upon running the Chef agent at regular intervals. They ...
98 votes
10 answers
13k views

Is it better practice to buy RAID disks individually vs. in bulk?

This may sound like an odd question, but it's generated some spirited discussion with some of my colleagues. Consider a moderately sized RAID array consisting of something like eight or twelve disks. ...
1 vote
3 answers
4k views

Best Practice: What domain admin credentials to use when adding/joining computer to network domain?

Environment: 1 Win2008R2 Network Server (also domain controller) 13 or so Workstations. Traditionally we've always used the server administrator credentials to join a workstation to a business domain ...
21 votes
2 answers
2k views

Is it bad practice to declare MX from differing networks?

We're using a 3rd-party service provider to send transactional email. I recently noticed increased failure rates for a given receiving domain. The sends fail with the error "498 No MX for example.com"...
3 votes
2 answers
2k views

New domain controller on a branch office: it is better to create a new AD site?

I am going to install a new DC on a recently grown branch site. I know that is a best practice to create a new site in Active Directory Site and Service, with the relative IP link cost and related ...
0 votes
1 answer
451 views

Should I create a new user for each web app?

I have a VPS and I'm trying to gather the best practices in terms of user setup for web services. I have different services in my server (a cloud app, a streaming app, etc). What I do know is that I ...
4 votes
1 answer
530 views

Best Practice Moving a Hard Drive from one VMWare ESX Guest to Another

When removing a hard disk from a VMWare ESX virtual machine running Windows, is it best practice to shut down the server first or is there a minimal risk (if the drive is not being written to at the ...
1 vote
1 answer
285 views

Should apex (or zone root) records have a matching PTR/pointer record

I am aware that apex records (records at the zone "root") can have PTR records, but frequently I see that zone root records do not have a matching PTR, or they are pointing to a different place than ...
3 votes
1 answer
428 views

Storing saltstack server configs in version control

I currently have a few servers that are managed by saltstack, every now and then saltstack fails to deploy the new configs because of an issue somewhere and it can take a while to work out what ...
1 vote
1 answer
662 views

Best practice: Wowza SSL Configuration

Screenshot: Server with Wowza running using a SSL certificate with basis configuration I get this result from the SSLLabs with the default configuration (see screenshot). The only places I can change ...
0 votes
2 answers
155 views

Bypass Browser Cache with Server Settings in Large Production Environment

We recently applied a patch to our ERP system that updated HTML, JavaScript and CSS files. After applying the patch a large volume of users called the help desk to report loss of functionality on the ...
-2 votes
1 answer
74 views

What are the dangers of buying a windows entreprise key online? [closed]

For multiple reasons I've settled on using Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB. Apart of getting a fake key or getting a legitimate key revoked, what are the dangers of purchasing / applying an unknown ...
0 votes
1 answer
55 views

Git branches for managing machine specific scripts and timers: OK or bad idea?

I have a bash script that I need to run on multiple (personal) machines, using systemd timers. While largely similar, there is some functionality in these scripts that I need enabled on some machines, ...
2 votes
3 answers
668 views

Hypervisor server Local storage Raid configuration

We have a couple of Dell PowerEdge R630 running Hyper-V and just bought new hard disks to fill all the empty slots. I was wοndering what kind of Raid configuration should we proceed. Currently each ...
5 votes
2 answers
5k views

Best Practices for AD DS Backup and Recovery?

So Microsoft claims that "you cannot use a network shared folder as a backup target for a system state backup", but I've seen plenty of posts where people indicate that they are able to do this from a ...
2 votes
2 answers
959 views

Solaris 11 ZFS Snapshot vs. New Boot Environment

I'm new to Solaris 11 and I have to apply updates. I read that you can create a ZFS snapshot -- apply updates -- then revert the snapshot if things break. I also read that you can create a backup of ...
3 votes
1 answer
1k views

Group Managed Service Accounts per service per server (Best practice?) and long names?

I've talked with a few colleagues about what might be best practice for using group managed service accounts in our environment. It seems that ideally, we would create 1 gMSA per service (e.g. SQL ...
2 votes
2 answers
1k views

How should web servers handle requests with incorrect Host header?

I am getting a number of requests to my site with the Host header set incorrectly (most commonly to the IP address instead of domain name). Currently I am returning 400 Bad Request. I am thinking of ...
3 votes
1 answer
717 views

Is having an IPv6 reverse lookup zone necessary for an Active Directory network?

Is having an IPv6 reverse lookup zone necessary for an Active Directory network? Normally I would just create it and move on, however, in this case the prefix is delegated and changes occasionally. ...
1 vote
0 answers
247 views

Serving dynamic website to multiple domains

I have created a website with a tiny administration panel that lets the owners change attributes about the site (primary color, background image, some content etc). Their changes are stored in a ...
0 votes
1 answer
155 views

How do multiple devops manage single chef cookbook?

I have created a cookbook and I am using manage.chef.io to host and deploy it. I have hosted the cookbook in GitHub private repo. Consider a scenario: If I make some changes in the cookbook and ...
5 votes
2 answers
342 views

Best practices to serve a large number of files

Currently we have one Windows Server 2008 R2 as a domain controller and file server. We're serving about 6 million JPGs to 4 IIS servers which are then served to web users. The problem is we're ...
16 votes
4 answers
30k views

A secure, standard iptables rule-set for a basic HTTP(s) webserver

I have been trying to put together a basic server iptables script that will work for most sites just running a basic webserver using HTTP(S) and SSH (ports 80, 443, & 22). After all, most VPS only ...
0 votes
0 answers
46 views

After system state restore: SBS Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.0 stopped working

So the system drive of our SBS 2011 server has crashed. We had a backup which we used to perform a systemstate recovery and non-authorative restore of Active Directory. Since the restore, we cannot ...
1 vote
3 answers
3k views

Is it good practice to set HTTP headers in the load balancer?

I am managing a setup where there are two ngnix application servers behind an nginx reverse proxy. I would like to set some headers like X-XSS-Protection or Strict-Transport-Security. Currently, it's ...
0 votes
1 answer
128 views

How to create an account, that can not login?

Our Unix systems rely on corporate AD for authentication and authorization. We need to create a few "role" accounts, which shall not be able to login themselves, but to which other accounts (...
14 votes
3 answers
11k views

Best practices for file layout in a Hyper-V server?

We've got a Hyper-V server set up, and the layout of the files is inconsistent because it was set up by several people. Here are the two different "templates" that were used: Template 1 D:\Hyper-V\...
10 votes
2 answers
12k views

Best strategy to keep chef cookbooks versions under control

I'm looking for ideas about chef cookbooks versions management. I know that you pin specific versions in the environment, but I'm not sure how to go about it. We use librarian-chef which installs 3rd ...
27 votes
5 answers
30k views

Where do companies typically store SSL certificates for future use?

We recently bought a wildcard SSL cert for our domain. We converted all of the certs to a Java keystore, but now we are asking ourselves where we should store these for later use. Do people use ...
11 votes
3 answers
15k views

The impact of Apache graceful restarts and user experience

Is it safe to perform a graceful restart of Apache on a production server? What effects will a graceful restart cause and what would be the impact (if any)? Will there be any detrimental impacts (e.g. ...
13 votes
4 answers
7k views

In Puppet, how would I secure a password variable (in this case a MySQL password)?

I am using Puppet to provision MySQL with a parameterised class: class mysql::server( $password ) { package { 'mysql-server': ensure => installed } package { 'mysql': ensure => ...

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