“Bruce, we reboot the server each morning when we come in. This keeps it from crashing,” my new client told me as we discussed the action plan we put together to make their network stable and problem free. As I tried to figure out how to respond to this, he went on to ask me if rebooting his server would be covered under Fixed IT. The answer is YES, if you want your server rebooted every day, we will do it for you. However if you are rebooting your server every day or even once a week, there is something else going on! In this customer’s case their backups were not set up correctly by their last vendor (who never seemed to get around to calling my new customer back, good for us, bad for them). Each night this backup process would get locked up and cause the server to fail when the staff arrived and started to log in to the network. Moreover, they were not even getting a complete backup of the data on the server!
This is why we spend the first two weeks cleaning up and stabilizing our new Fixed IT customer’s networks. We find all the little issues that no one else had the time or the motivation to deal with and take care of them. Solving these issues eliminates network downs and computer issues, while allowing us to focus on maintaining the system rather than reacting to outages. Oh, and we actually test your backups for you.
If you are currently rebooting your server each night, it’s time to pick up the phone and contact Bruce about getting a problem prevention network audit done.
