Summary

This chapter has touched on a large number of concepts. You learned that the key to keeping your systems up is taking them down to perform regular maintenance and to apply security and application patches that have been tested in the lab. You learned that you need to have regular maintenance windows to ensure that you have time to perform needed upgrades and updates. You learned that by having these regularly scheduled windows you are able to accurately set expectation for management and the end- user community about the availability of the systems. This in turn enables you to post strong uptime numbers . By having management buy in on Service Level Agreements, you are able to justify your maintenance tasks and the manpower needed to accomplish them.

You saw that most maintenance tasks can be automated. Scripting can't replace a qualified technical resource for performing maintenance and for observing the effects on the system but they do allow you to remove the potential for human error and ensure that procedures are carried out exactly the same way every time. You saw that common GUI interfaces you use daily for tasks can often be accessed from a command line and be used in automated scripts.

Careful choices of files that get backed up and the usage of clever backup technologies can greatly simplify the task of backing up and restoring data.

By keeping checklists of tasks performed you are able to accurately audit the history of a system and spot trends in resource usage. This enables you to plan for the future rather than always exist in a reactive mode. By performing these tasks on a regular schedule, you become intimately familiar with your systems and can easy spot potential problems. These are the marks of a professional IT organization.