Questions tagged [maintenance]
maintenance is keeping hardware and/or software systems in a healthy state by performing tasks such as updating, cleaning or replacing parts.
247
questions
47
votes
4
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What is the ibdata1 file in my /var/lib/mysql directory?
Logging in to my Webmin control panel, I noticed that virtually all of my disk space is full. I searched for the ten largest files/ directories on my system and found that a file called ibdata1 is ...
33
votes
3
answers
7k
views
Disable all services, except ssh
How can I disable all services except ssh on modern (systemd based) linux distributions?
I need to implement a maintenance mode.
All these services need to be down:
postgres
postfix
apache
cups
...
33
votes
7
answers
26k
views
Does a server need a GPU?
Do I need a GPU on a text and console only server? No GPU as in no iGPU and dGPU. Im going to be using SSH, so I dont need a display out.
Im using Linux, but the OS shouldn't affect the results
31
votes
4
answers
48k
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Maintenance page on nginx, best practices
I want to configure the server to show a maintenance page when it exist. I tried this code and works:
location / {
try_files /maintenance.html $uri $uri/ @codeigniter;
}
But I noticed it would ...
25
votes
13
answers
4k
views
Anti-static wrist straps: are they worth it?
Do you use an antistatic wrist strap when working on hardware?
Do they really work?
Have you ever fried some hardware that would have been saved if you had been wearing one?
I know some people who ...
19
votes
10
answers
2k
views
Should core system servers be able to connect to the internet for maintenance/support?
A couple of our servers have Oracle maintenance licenses. Our hardware vendor asked there was internet connection in the server room. Our policy is that all machines in that room is isolated from the ...
19
votes
4
answers
14k
views
Determining LTO Cleaning Tape Expiration?
I have some LTO tape drives, and use cleaning tapes as required, but the lifetime of the cleaning tapes is not as predictable as I would have expected. I'm looking for a way to query the system, ...
18
votes
6
answers
1k
views
Any ideas on how to run maintenance on a site that is always under use?
I help out with a large gaming site in Australia. We run competitions from 7am local time to 1am the next day, every day of the week. We haven't skipped a day since the site was released. Naturally, ...
16
votes
4
answers
46k
views
haproxy: how to prepare a server maintenance without kicking app sessions?
The issue
I'm using haproxy to load balance web servers. I use session persistence with additional cookies as some applications use session files and these are not synchronized between servers.
I ...
15
votes
1
answer
38k
views
doveadm: Delete messages older than date
I've a situation where some users keep very old messages (+5 years) on their mailboxes that are just a waste of space and due to safety reasons should also be deleted.
I find out that I could use ...
15
votes
1
answer
18k
views
How often should I scrub my RAID?
In general I would like to know how often a RAID array needs to be scrubbed. What contributes to the need to scrub more often (reading data?, writing data?, unexpected shutdowns?, drive age?, drive ...
14
votes
9
answers
7k
views
MMORPG server maintenance
It seems that most mmorpg games have some regular server maintenance, some every day, some once a week. What is it that they actually have to do, and why is it necessary ?
If you start with such a ...
14
votes
3
answers
10k
views
DBA who is worried reorganizing or rebuidling indexes may cause data loss?
We have some databases with index fragmentation that is > 95%. As best I can tell the indexes have never been rebuilt much less reorganized. In years.
(In fairness, these tables do seem to have auto-...
13
votes
7
answers
28k
views
How often should you defrag a Server?
Have a few servers and they have not been de-fragmented for two years. Is there a standard for what percentage should be fragmented before defragmenting?
The servers are Windows 2003.
13
votes
3
answers
6k
views
What is the best Time-Of-Day to run the maintenance of an international (English) website?
If you want to have a non-country-specific website in English, what is/are the best time-of-day to run the maintenance? You can also answer by specifying what is the worst time-of-day to run the ...
13
votes
3
answers
490
views
Heat Sink compound and older desktops and workstations
This is my first question asked on SF, so be gentle kids.
As my desktops (approximately 110 or so) have begun to age and with my users resisting Windows 8, I've begun to notice an odd trend. We are ...
13
votes
1
answer
6k
views
What Data Center room routine maintenance tasks should be done?
Beyond the work done "inside" equipment (administration, programming, network config) there exists physical equipment and rooms. This physical room equipment needs care and feeding as well on a ...
12
votes
5
answers
3k
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What is a reasonable maintenance schedule for Windows PCs?
I am in charge of maintaining around 25 PCs with various versions of Windows (Vista, 7, 8).
I was thinking something along the following lines:
Every 4–6 months:
Take an image of the system ...
12
votes
9
answers
5k
views
Should old servers be retired
I have servers which are still running well but are over 5 years old. They are still doing the job perfectly and there will be no advantage to upgrade the servers, should I just let them run forever ...
12
votes
10
answers
11k
views
Firmware Best Practices and Update Schedules
Firmware receives very little attention when it comes to updates. Out of sight, out of mind.
Many devices: RAID controllers, NICs, chipsets, and even hard drives, get some benefit from being updated....
12
votes
4
answers
48k
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Why is "DbccFilesCompact" status is "Suspended"?
I am running SHRINK file on a 600G data file.
Currently, status is reported as "suspended"
and sys.dm_exec_requests.percent_complete for DbccFilesCompact command reports that it is running (but very ...
10
votes
4
answers
48k
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How to recover the strength of a laptop battery? [closed]
I got a laptop, which I brought a year ago, which has a battery that can last for 3 hours.
6 months ago, the battery's life dropped down to roughly 15 minutes (Windows says its supposed to last for ...
10
votes
4
answers
1k
views
How Serviceable are Tape Drives?
I'm contemplating an auto-loading tape drive as part of a backup strategy. This would be my first experience with tape backup. The cost-effectiveness of tape drives seems to depend on the assumption ...
10
votes
6
answers
4k
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How do *you* track and document routine maintenance?
What software or system do you guys out on server fault use to remind you to do routine maintenance? How do you checklist and log the various items you are supposed to check? Do you have an internal ...
9
votes
4
answers
2k
views
How do you maintain your database without taking your site down?
There are certain database maintenance tasks, like re-organizing indexes, moving files, changing schema, etc, that require disabling any applications that are using the database.
What are some good ...
9
votes
6
answers
27k
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Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Annual Sysadmin Tasks
This should probably be community wiki. I'm trying to come up with a list of all the sysadmin tasks that we should be doing on a regular basis because I believe we're not doing enough at our company. ...
8
votes
8
answers
3k
views
What is the oldest hardware still in production use? How is it kept running? [closed]
In the spirit of the question What is your oldest hardware that still works?, I'd like to ask:
What is the oldest hardware you know that is still in production use?
And what challenges did you (or ...
8
votes
4
answers
12k
views
Freeing up space in my SVN repository
I have an SVN repository hosted on a freemium site with a maximum repository size. As I approach this capacity I am aware of files I've checked in that I know I can remove permanently to free up disk ...
8
votes
2
answers
3k
views
How to set only specific nginx server block into maintenance mode programmatically
I am looking for a solution to automate one of our application's deployment process. In the beginning of deployment, I would like to programmatically set the specified server into maintenance mode and ...
8
votes
2
answers
2k
views
Backup SQL Server to a Network Share
How do you backup an SQL Server Database to a Network Share?
7
votes
6
answers
7k
views
What are a regular maintenance you need to perform on your Linux server?
I have a server that host few websites, I haven't done any maintenance for about 2 month other than looking at a couple logs and compressing them.
Just wondering what are a regular maintenance you ...
7
votes
1
answer
801
views
Supermicro server onsite maintenance
We are considering moving from Dell to Supermicro servers. The main concern from management is what to do with maintenance. What do you guys do for same day onsite service maintenance plans?
7
votes
2
answers
4k
views
Easiest way to show Maintenance page during EC2 instance down time
I need to perform some maintenance, which involves down-times of my EC2 production server. I would like to serve some user friendly Maintenance page meanwhile.
The easiest solution, I was able to ...
7
votes
7
answers
533
views
What are some ways to coordinate server maintenance information with your team? [closed]
I am on a team that coordinates maintenance activity and some other activities for some servers in our company. Now that there are more people on the team and more servers under our care, it is ...
7
votes
2
answers
3k
views
Is a 'high' IO rate healthy?
I do a lot of work with my Linode that currently hosts a site, but every now and then (usually once every two months or so) - I'll get a warning about my IO rate being too high (Usually just higher ...
7
votes
6
answers
9k
views
How to show a maintenance page for website when our network is down
We host our ASP.NET web sites internally (within our DMZ). When we are doing network maintenance, etc we would like to have our sites display a maintenance page, but our network is down so our hosting ...
7
votes
1
answer
6k
views
How to reduce or shrink the MFT (Master File Table)?
I have a dedicated windows server 2003 with more than 3 millions of files, recently I created a new partition to separate the website files from the OS.
Later I reduced the site of the OS with some ...
6
votes
5
answers
14k
views
How can I automate the deployment of cisco IOS upgrades?
I was googling this and didn't turn up anything.
If you have 100 some odd Cisco routers and switches how do you push out new IOS releases? Certain not by manually logging into every device. The only ...
6
votes
1
answer
8k
views
How to check how many users are online?
I administer a ASP.NET website that has decent traffic. In the middle of the day, I sometimes would need to either redeploy the website, change the configuration in the web.config file or make some ...
5
votes
3
answers
2k
views
Server Uptime Reporting and Tracking
My department maintains 6 servers running both Windows Server 2003 and Ubuntu Server.
We have to report and track our uptime. I believe we have to have a 95% uptime and we have no real way to track ...
5
votes
2
answers
2k
views
What is a good backup plan for Hyper-V Virtual Images?
I have one machine with Hyper-V (not the bare metal version - the Windows 2008 OS version) that we are experimenting with.
I would love to backup from the host OS and not from each individual virtual ...
5
votes
4
answers
2k
views
MySQL: Hunting down unused databases
Is there any commands to look up databases that has no any activity in a month or so?
Just take SQL dumps for a month and run diff and if there's no differences delete that DB?
5
votes
3
answers
757
views
Hot Swap Ultra320 SCSI LTO-Tape Drive
Can an Ultra320 SCSI LTO tape drive (or any SCSI device) be hot swapped without needing to power down the system? The current LTO tape drive is the only device on the SCSI host.
If the above can ...
5
votes
1
answer
3k
views
Synology volumes vs shared folders
What is the benefit of making more than 1 volume on disk group on Synology DiskStation? Or, in another words, what is the benefit of organising data into a) many volumes vs b) many shared folders on ...
5
votes
5
answers
3k
views
What is on your periodic system maintenance? (Windows)
I'm looking at creating a schedule and list of periodic maintenance for our Windows servers (2k3, 2k8). Any thoughts, suggestions or ideas of things that should be implemented. Bonus points for ...
5
votes
0
answers
10k
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Do I really need the PHP maxlifetime hourly cron job? [closed]
On my Debian Wheezy, every half-hour a cron job runs:
find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -ignore_readdir_race -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/...
4
votes
25
answers
769
views
What do you do to prevent stupid mistakes?
I saw this comment:
"Been there, done that. We aliased the
killall-command on the solaris-boxes
after that: alias killall='echo
ORLLY?' =) – Commander Keen May 28 at
12:03"
In response to ...
4
votes
6
answers
738
views
receiving mail during Exchange maintenance?
I was part of a small company, and sometimes we had to bring down our Exchange server to perform maintenance. The majority of mail during the downtime would get redelivered in a timely manner, but ...
4
votes
6
answers
4k
views
How to do scheduled Linux server backup
I need to organize automated backup for databases, websites, ftp, email, etc. at Ubuntu 9.04 and since I've never done it before, I'm looking for places to learn. What needs to be done, what (free) ...
4
votes
4
answers
8k
views
How to temporariliy disable access to Oracle database?
I would like to be able to temporarily disable all access to an Oracle database, except my own, to be able to perform maintenance actions without interruptions. Simplest way?