Last Updated on Monday, 28 December 2009 11:44 Sunday, 14 December 2008 17:00

Q: Why do I need maintenance done on my servers every month or even more often when it's working fine?

A: A server is a complex system consisting of many interconnected and interdependent pieces.  From the hardware components, up to the low-level drivers, up to the main operating system (Windows or Linux) and all of it's sub-systems, up to high-level drivers, up to higher level applications and server software (Exchange, Apache, MySQL, etc.), if any piece of that system is having problems, you will not know it until it is too late if you are not performing regular maintenance checks.

The server may appear to work fine for months or even years while various sub-systems or entire systems quietly begin to fail and silently report the problem over and over.  If you do not actually look at the places where those built-in systems report the problems and failures, you will not know until a disaster happens.  At that point, it's too late to do anything except clean up the mess, often while everyone and everything that uses that server are unable to use it to do anything at all.  Often, pieces of the entire system will never actually report problems anywhere, and the only way to know there is a problem is by testing them (tape backups are one good example).

If you only perform regular maintenance once a month during the life of your server, you are only doing the equivalent of an annual check-up with your doctor to make sure your body is still working as well as you think it is.  Once a month checks are the bare minimum, and many checks for things like fan failures, CPU/environmental temperatures, anti- virus and hacker alerts should be checked on a weekly basis.