Checkpoints

---

If you’ve been reading carefully, you’ll have encountered several notes and cautions describing situations that, if not considered, can result in strange and unusual things happening in your site. These administrative lapses might be called “gotchas” because of the sneaky way they have of jumping up to get you. Let’s recap the most significant gotchas here.

Planning and Identifying Site Systems

First and foremost, be sure that your deployment strategy has identified which servers will serve as site systems, how many servers you might need, and which roles they will play. Your answers will depend on the size of your site; the number of clients, packages, advertisements, and so on involved; and the current state of your network and network traffic. The soundest approach is to test, track, and analyze. Use the tools available to learn how your site server and site systems will perform under different conditions.

The Performance console’s System Monitor utility is an ideal Windows tool to assist you with this analysis on Windows servers. Use Network Monitor to track and analyze traffic generated between the site server and its site systems. Identify, wherever possible, those times when site traffic might take advantage of lighter traffic loads. As we delve more deeply into SMS processes, such as inventory collection and package distribution, you’ll learn how to identify and analyze network traffic.

Disk Space

The amount of disk space required for each type of site system varies. Be sure that the site systems you have in mind have adequate disk space to carry out their function and store their data. CAPs and management points, for example, need space to store inventory data, discovery data, and status messages from clients, as well as package information, advertisements, site lists, and client configuration files. Of course, the number of clients you’re managing and the number of packages and advertisements that you generate will affect the disk space requirements, but this quantity can—with some effort and resource analysis— be determined.

Distribution points require as much disk space as each package you store. Again, with some calculation effort and planning, you can determine this number. The space required by a reporting point will depend on the number of reports that you have configured and the location of the reporting point within the hierarchy. Server locator points probably require the least amount of additional space since their primary function is to direct a client to an appropriate CAP or management point.

Connection Accounts

Connection accounts were discussed in detail in the section entitled “Site System Connection Accounts” earlier in this chapter. For SMS site servers running in standard security mode, additional connection accounts beyond the default account that SMS creates or the SMS service account aren’t really required unless you have specific security issues to address on specific site systems. Site systems running in advanced security mode make use of computer accounts rather than user accounts, as well as the new SMS_SiteSystem- ToSiteServerConnection group account to which the computer accounts of site systems should be added.

---