Server Maintenance - Library Systems Office

Server Maintenance Procedures

Summary

The Library Systems Office does server maintenance on Friday evenings, so all Library staff should close all applications and logoff from their machines before leaving work on Friday. In case of more urgent maintenance, staff may recieve e-mail asking to close applications on other days.

Introduction

Many of the Library's electronic services are hosted on servers that the Library Systems Office (LSO) maintains, for example, file serving (the G: and H: drives), web serving, etc. Periodically, the LSO staff needs to update these servers with "patches", that is, software that fixes problems with the operating system. Often, these patches fixes security holes.

When fixing these server problems, usually one or more of the services on the server (e.g., the web service) needs to be stopped and restarted; sometimes, the entire server needs to be rebooted.

How does this affect me?

When a service or an entire server is restarted, anyone who happens to be using the service at that time will see an interuption or a disconnection. For example, if the web service is restarted, no web pages will be served during this restart period. If a staff member is using Microsoft Access to attach to a database on LIBSYSNICK (our SQL Server), then their connection will be severed.

So what do I do?

To avoid the possibilty of data loss, be sure to close all your applications that access networked files or data before any of the server or services restarts.

How do I know when a service or server is going to be restarted

The LSO performs server maintenance on Friday evenings after 5:00PM. So, a good procedure is to close all your applications and logout of your machine before leaving work on Friday.

Sometimes a patch is so urgent that the LSO cannot wait and must apply the patch and reboot the server before Friday afternoon. In those cases, the LSO will send out e-mail on the LIBNEWS list serve warning about the service interuption.