Preventative maintenance for servers 4

[twoody54]

Hello all,

I'm a newbie to network administration and kinda got thrown into the fire here at work. I started as an intern for a small firm and the administrator left for a new job before I really got to learn from him. I'm graduating in a couple weeks and will be working here full-time for the time-being.

Anyway, I'm just wondering what maintainance you do for the server on a regular basis. We have three Netfinity 5100 servers running NT 4.0 TS with Citrix installed on two of them. One thing I know I should start doing, the previous administrator didn't, is create rescue disks on a regular basis. How do you recommend doing this? I was told to use the rdisk command. SHould I use any options with it? I know you should rotate them too, a disk for every other day.

I do virus scans/updates reguarly, reboots, backup tapes, various individual program maintenance issues. That's all I can think of off the top of my head right now. If you have any other suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.

Again thanks for any suggestions and if you need any more info let me know.

 

[tk36]

Hi
I am self-taught as well. I'll tell you what I do which might give you some ideas. We got 5 Citrix Servers (Metaframe1.8 on NT4 TSE in 1 farm) I run Performance Moniter (perfmon) daily to log the following data :
Cache Faults/Sec(Memory), Page Faults/Sec(Memory), %Usage(Paging File),Session Error Out(Server),Work Items Shortage(Server),Network Errors/Sec (Redirector),Server Sessions Hung(Redirector),Current Commands (Redirector). I check the Chart each morning to make sure that everything is within safe range. Mainly to check that Page Faults is not too high, no Bottleneck, no network problem. You can get more details of the Performance Monitor and the counters from these pages :

http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?AuthorID=333

http://www.lanw.com/pmnm/pmkc.doc

http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/windows/fog0000000013.html

http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/comp/winnt/perftune.htm

and the Microsoft Technet page of course.
I also check event viewers for any errors on all the servers. Both the Performance Monitor and the event viewer, you can run from your machine and select the server you want to check.
I hope this is of use to you.
Cheers.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I would always recommend having a test server, in case you need to make any modifications to the live ones. I put up a couple of FAQs on the subject ;-)

Hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[twoody54]

Thanks tk and CE,

TK, what interval do you do your log in the performance monitor for?

Thanks

 

[tk36]

Schedule (useing Winat) for weekdays (we're university and the Citrix apps are for Staff) from 10.00-12:00 and 14:00-16:00. I export the data to an Excel file to get the graph with the warning if any counter is above the threashold. I delete the log files regularly as they get big quite quickly. Once you set the perfmon up using datalog, the log file will be auto created. Details of how to do it is in one of the links I gave you earlier.

 

[Guest_imported]

Reboot often. At least once a week. Once a day is even better

 

[CitrixEngineer]

If you're running MetaFrame XPe, you can use Resource Manager instead of Perfomance Monitor (it uses the same counters, plus a few additional Citrix specific ones). It provides real-time graphing and useful reports natively.

Also, XPe provides a reboot scheduling tool.


Hope this helps. CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[twoody54]

Thanks for the tip. We're on 1.8. I realized I should have specified that after I posted. Thanks though. I'm planning on taking a Citrix class late summer early fall. I've looked at a lot of the info and got a manual off one of the sites that was listed in the faq's. Haven't had too much time to look into it yet as I've been real busy with school these last couple weeks as my last semester EVER (thank god) is about to end.

 

[MikeKap]

If you have about an hour (which includes the installation time) to review a new program that will give you what you are asking for, plus a LOT more, check out this application - SysTrack 2.0. A free 14-day demo can be found at

http://www.lakesidesoftware.com/download.htm.

Best of luck to you! MK

 

[DaveNamou]

This thread should help on rebooting your server on a scheduled maintenance.

thread48-212447 Dave Namou, MCSE CCEA