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   Take Control of OS X Server, Chapter 14: Server Maintenance

   Charles Edge

   This article is a pre-release chapter in the upcoming 'Take Control of
   OS X Server,' by Charles Edge, scheduled for public release later in
   2014. Apart from [1]Chapter 1: Introducing OS X Server, and [2]Chapter
   2: Choosing Server Hardware, these chapters are available only to
   [3]TidBITS members; see [4]'Take Control of OS X Server' Streaming in
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     __________________________________________________________________

Server Maintenance

   Assuming you've worked your way through this book in order,
   congratulations! You should have a fully functional server that's
   providing you and your users with the services you need. I've sprinkled
   a variety of maintenance tips that are specific to different services
   throughout the book, but to close out, I want to offer some general
   advice to keep your server running happily.

   Don't assume that you need to do much here'I've visited clients for
   whom I've installed OS X Server years before to find that the uptime on
   the server is over 1,000 days (that means nothing was rebooted for 3
   years!). That's pretty impressive, if only in that they didn't install
   new versions of OS X or Server itself, suffer a power outage, or even
   need to move the server for three years. You shouldn't necessarily
   expect that level of stability in every situation, especially given the
   move to annual major releases of operating systems.

Document All Server Changes in a Wiki

   The biggest problem that most long-term servers have is that changes
   are made willy-nilly with no record of what the settings were before,
   why the change was made, if there were any unintended side effects that
   had to be worked around, and so on. I strongly recommend that you
   create a Server Admin wiki and use its blog to document all changes
   that are made to the server, by you or anyone else. You can also create
   standalone wiki pages that document how to handle particular situations
   that may arise more than once. (Or, if you want to keep it outside
   Server to ensure access in the event that the server dies, consider
   using Google Docs.)

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References

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