What would happen if you lost all the course work for a whole year for a group of students? What would be the comeback on that? How would it affect your school if the network was down for 24 hours or more?

The potential impact of these and other damaging network scenarios can be greatly reduced by employing regular system maintenance tasks and pro-active checks.

Daily, weekly, monthly and termly maintenance tasks and checklists can help identify and overcome potential issues before they get out of hand. In addition, these tasks ensure that if disaster does strike, you have the tools and backup data available to be able to have the network up and running again as quickly as possible with the minimum of disruption.

This article discusses in detail the various maintenance procedures for your network and the importance of carrying out these tasks. We also include example daily, weekly, and monthly/termly checklists in the form of Microsoft® Word® documents which you can download (from the Download section below), edit if required and use.

Although this has been written with Community Connect® in mind, the majority of tasks can be applied to any network.

Daily checks

Backups
One of the most important of all proactive network checks is confirming that the overnight backup has been successful and then swapping media ready for the following night. Users accidentally deleting files, files corrupted by viruses and hard disk failures are all examples of situations when it is essential to have backups of data in place.

Irrespective of the solution deployed, the same daily checks still need to be carried out to ensure the previous backups were successful.

Virus checks
Viruses can seriously disrupt a network, and unfortunately damage the credibility of the people responsible for their prevention; however, they occur. It is therefore essential to ensure that the latest antivirus updates and definitions are always in place and that any infected computers are swiftly dealt with.

Virus definition updates and current server/computer virus infection information for RM recommended antivirus, powered by Trend Micro™, can be found within the Trend Micro Server Management Console at the Security server. Further documentation regarding antivirus software and carrying out checks can be found within the RM Knowledge Library.

Server hard disk space
Community Connect servers will contain the following drive partitions (actual drive letters can depend on whether the server is a Microsoft® Windows® Server 2012, 2016 or 2019 and whether it was an upgrade or a new installation).

• Drive C: Windows operating system.
• Drive D: Applications, RM tools including the CC4 Database.
• Drive F: Multimedia.
• Drive G: Learning Resources, Staff Shared Areas.
• Drive H: Users' data (work and profiles).

Allowing drive C: to run out of space would cause the system to crash, so it should be checked regularly to ensure that there is at least  2GB for CC4. Service Packs can only be installed to drive C: so space needs to be reserved for these as well. As a general rule, where possible, avoid installing software to drive C: to reserve space.

Drive D:'s space must also be regularly monitored as this drive holds the Community Connect 4 database. 

Before replacing or adding new hard disks, confirm there is no unused disk space that can be assigned to the drive in question using the Disk Management tool. New servers sometimes have available space that is initially not allocated to any particular drive. 

Disk space may also be increased via VMware vSphere Client in a virtualised environment. If you have a Storage Area Network (SAN), you may also have additional disk space that can be assigned to a server running low on space. Please review the articles in the Other Useful Articles section below for further advice.

Unauthorised administrator level users
Administrator or system administrator level users have complete power over the whole network. They can look at any user's work, delete any critical system files and change the administrator user passwords if they wish. Therefore, it is important to regularly check who is an administrator level user to make sure no unauthorised users have this level of access.
The following command run from a Command Prompt at either a server or a computer lists all network administrators on the network (only when the group exists):

Net group "Domain Admins"
Net group "Administrators"

Support calls
Support calls raised with RM can be updated with additional and important information online, as an alternative to emails or telephone. It is therefore an important task to regularly check support calls online to see if there has been any significant update which can be acted upon straight away.

Weekly checks

Test restore from backup
Remember, the only reason you make backups is to be able to restore the data if required, therefore regularly perform a trial restoration of a file to verify that your data has been successfully backed up. A trial restoration can uncover hardware issues that do not show up with software verifications. It is better to detect and fix an issue before data really does need to be restored.

User My Documents folders
Each network user has his or her own individual My Documents folder stored on a server (Drive H:). As part of the regular maintenance checklist, as listed in the daily checks above, drive H: should be regularly checked for available space. In addition, attention should also be given to the amount of space taken up by those individual users who have been given unlimited quotas (My Documents disk space) in order to ensure they do not overuse this privilege, having an excessive impact on the overall available disk space on drive H:.

As part of the security of Community Connect, users are not allowed to run any programs within their My Documents folder, or from removable media. It is still important, however, to regularly check user folders for any unsuitable files, including documents, programs, pictures, music, and videos, possibly downloaded from the Internet or brought in on disk.
Individual user home directories can be checked from within the RM Management Console, or by searching for files within a group or all users under H:\RMUsers at the server.

Learning Resources and Shared Documents
Learning Resources, by default, have been removed from installations of Connect on Prem networks - running Microsoft Server 2016 and 2019. For further information, please see TEC3973859 in the Other Useful Articles section below.

Event Viewer
Event Viewer provides a record of events that can be useful in both monitoring and troubleshooting system activity.

Some critical events, such as a full disk or a power supply issue, would be displayed as an on screen message. Using event logs and the Event Viewer, you can troubleshoot various hardware and software issues and monitor security events.

Information, warnings, and errors reported to the system are recorded and this can be useful when troubleshooting a network issue. In addition, regularly checking the Event Viewer may help to proactively resolve an issue before it becomes critical and affects the whole system.

Event Viewer can be accessed at the server from the Start menu, Programs, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer. It can also be accessed by right-clicking on My Computer at the server and choosing Manage.

Click to enlarge

Memory and CPU usage
As new programs and services are installed on to a server, you may find that the overall speed or performance of the network deteriorates, as they each compete for processor time and available memory. A quick and very useful regular maintenance check is to open up Task Manager at the server and confirm you have sufficient hardware capacity (memory (RAM) and processor (CPU) speed) to avoid overuse of these resources. You will need to confirm memory usage is not approaching its full capacity and processor activity is not constantly above 80%.

A lack of available memory causes excessive page file activity. This is when data in memory (RAM) is copied to and from the hard disk for temporary storage due to lack of available space, with a resulting overall slowdown in memory access speed and hence the performance of the system as a whole.

Overuse of the processor causes bottlenecks, or queues of tasks waiting to be completed by the processor. Upgrading the hardware or reducing the software load in both cases will improve performance.

RAID array consistency checks
One drive in an array may have different data to that expected and may thus cause a fail when read or when error correction is attempted by the RAID controller. Examples of inconsistent data in an array are corrupt system files, hard drives going offline and RAID array rebuild failures.

For details on how to check RAID array consistency please see Other Useful Articles.

Monthly and termly checks

Hard disk defragmentation

During the day to day use of a computer or server the hard drive fragments files as they are written to it. It will find available spaces and place the files in these spaces on the hard disk. This results in files being fragmented across the hard disk. As the hard disk, like a CD, has to skip through the different rings to find one file, the more fragmented it gets the longer it takes to find files.

Defragmentation puts as many of the file pieces together as possible so search times are reduced. Here is how to check if a hard disk needs to be defragmented and how to do it. This applies to both Community Connect computers and servers.

It is recommended that a defragmentation is only started when the computer or server will not be in use. 

1. Log on as a system administrator.
2. Right-click My Computer and select Manage.
3. Expand the Storage node in the left-hand pane and select Disk Defragmenter.
4. In the right-hand pane at the top there will be a selection of volumes, choose the volume you wish to check.
5. Below the volume selection click the button entitled Analyze. This will run for a short amount of time and then give a pop up box stating whether the volume should be defragmented or not. 
6. If no-one is using the device click the Defragment button, otherwise close and defragment the drive at another time.

The length of time a volume defragmentation takes depends on the amount of fragmented files and the size of the volume. It is best practice to do this out of hours, during half terms and if urgently needed for one volume over night.

Other monthly/termly checks include:

• Updating records of network topology, e.g. computer moves, new switches, printers, etc.
• Changing network administrator level passwords.
• Check software licensing paperwork is complete and up to date.
• Check warranty renewal deadlines.
• Place monthly/termly backup in a heatproof and fireproof safe.

Conclusion
Although it would be impossible to write a list of routine tasks to cover every network, this will hopefully provide you with a good base which you can adapt and extend according to your needs.