SBS 2003 Server Maintenance

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Aoreugif

n00b
Joined
Dec 3, 2008
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I'm new to the IT field and I'm in charge of taking care of a Microsoft SBS 2003 w/ about 45-50 workstations on it. I know about the basics Defrag Drives,Patches & Updates,Disk cleanup, is there anything else I could do to ensure a sooth running server?
Is there a master check list of maintenance to do Daily,Weekly and Quarterly on servers or do you just pick this stuff up as you go?
Thanks for your input :D
 
Depends on the server, the load on it, quality of the hardware, what other software you're running on it.

I have some SBS setups that have a lot of clients, and they run a LOT from the server, so it has heavy loads...and a few I have scheduled to reboot every Sunday early in the morning to keep it running smoothly.

Other clients with smaller networks and less of a load of SBS, like..only DC/infrastructure and e-mail..light file sharing, those things can run for months on end rock steady.

If you have services exposed like RWW, etc...you'll want to maintain your Microsoft Updates to keep the server better protected.

Obviously check your backup, the integrated SBS backup shows right up in the Server Managers monitoring section..where you can always check on the health of the server..eyeball a nice well layed out dashboard of the server right there.

Check servers hardware once in a while, like any other server..see if some hard drives are ready to jump off the cliff.

Occasionally make sure BIOS and drivers of the server are updated. Use caution about updating NIC drives remotely.

Check antivirus of course.
 
"If you have services exposed like RWW, etc...you'll want to maintain your Microsoft Updates to keep the server better protected" We do have RWW running and I do keep up with my updates. Is there a place where I could go to see if there is any known issues with an update? Reason why I'm asking is that I ran this one update and upon reeboot lost connection to the sever, Come to find out that the update turned on my internal firewall.

Thank you!
 
I forgot to mention the Small Business Server "Best Practices Analyzer"
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...7A-DE19-49BB-800F-352F3B6F2922&displaylang=en

Microsoft has them for several server products.....they're good to run. Install it, update it, and follow the suggestions. A few times a year update it and see if it has any new suggestions to follow.

I haven't had an update "turn on the firewall" on me....are you running it multi-homed? The firewall service should only kick in if you have dual NICs. If you have dual NICs on your server, but are only using one, make sure you disable the unused NIC.

Another suggestion, open/forward port 3389 to your server..since often when doing updates IIS will restart and bump you out of RDC. Yeah you can usually wait a few minutes and then punch in again once IIS restarts, but once in a blue moon you'll find yourself out of luck from RWW until you go in the next day and bounce the server.

Another good forum dedicated to SBS which you should bookmark and join
http://www.smallbizserver.net/Default.aspx
 
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