What steps can I take to minimize server downtime?

What steps can I take to minimize server downtime?

It is our belief that a professional webserver benefits from some monitoring capabilities to ensure availability. To decrease any "downtime" of your ChemOffice Websever, we highly recommend the installation of a webserver monitoring utility. Some example programs are:

IPSENTRY:

www.ipsentry.com

A1 Monitor:

www.a1monitor.com

Internet Watchdog:

http://netwinsite.com/watchdog-server-monitoring-software.htm

There are other applications that can do the same. We don't recommend any specific webserver monitoring software. Here at CambridgeSoft, we have implemented the IPSentry utility for our webservers. A good webserver monitoring utility will send an alert when the server has a problem, and can also be configured to restart the webserver (or run a batch file with whatever commands you feel are appropriate) to correct any problems that may occur.

We are not able to provide technical support for server monitoring utilities, but if you do decide to use IPSentry, you may find the following information useful:

IPSentry issues:

1. It will not work with Microsoft Terminal Services (remote administration).

2. If two instances of IPSentry get launched on the same machine, IPSentry can hang.

How we use IPSentry for our public webservers:

Basically, IPSentry can run any batch file and/or send email on failure. You can control how many failures it detects before it runs the batch file. Failure can be defined in many ways, though the most reliable is a checksum on the contents of a page.

Depending on the configuration, the batch file does different things on different computers.

Some of our batch files include:

wlbs stop
kill cfw.exe
iisreset /restart
wlbs start

Other webservers here at CambridgeSoft do a restart of the computer (much more reliable than iisreset) which uses a program from the Windows 2000 Server resource kit.

These batch files include:

Shutdown /L /R /Y /C /T:1

IPSentry also comes with a utility called ishutdown that allows for remote restarts of computers.

The batch file includes:

ishutdown /machine=IPADDRESS

where IPADDRESS is the actual IP Address of the machine.