System Maintenance
From TeleFlow
System Maintenance is the act of providing preventative maintenance to a computer system, so that it will operate correctly for as long as possible. Please note that this section is only a guide line for consideration. As with all pages in this wiki, teleflow.org invites the community to update and improve this list.
Contents |
Physical Care
- Dusting: (every 6 months) - Ensure computer is opened up, and dust is removed from CPU heat sink, and fans.
- Vibration: (every 1 month) - Ensure the system is not vibrating, or running hot
Operating System
- Windows Patches: (every 2 weeks) - Microsoft patches are important for security, but due to the nature of the drivers involved with telephony, automatically installed patches can cause the server to halt. NOTE: patches must be applied manually on a regular basis.
Database Server
- Backup: (every day) - Each night, an automated process should dump the contents of the database to a SQL file, which should then be FTPs to a remote computer. Navicat has a utility that can set up an automated process in windows.
- Pack and Re-index: (every 3 months) - The database should be stopped, backed up, packed and re-indexed. Navicat provides a handy means to do this task.
- While the database is unavailable, it is a good practice to put your IVR system into Maintenance Mode while performing the above procedures.
TeleFlow Server
- Check for restarts: (every 1 day) - Yellow lights indicate that a call was dropped and restarted. The occasional dropped call is normal, however, more than one a day on the entire system may indicated that a problem has crept in to the system. If the database is down for maintenance, then yellow lights may occur.
Malware
- Antivirus: (run daily, check every 2 weeks) - Ensure anti-virus is always up to date.
Archiving
- A determination should be made on what files need to be archived, and on what basis. Files may include zips of entire directories, and date named files.
Disk Care
- Ghost image: (every 1 year) - During a scheduled down time, care should be taken to gather a ghost image of the computer in order for a quick rebuild.
- Disk Defragmenter: (every 6 months) - Assuming the computer has a relatively large amount of free diskspace, this process should only be require on occasion
- Log files and recordings: (every 2 weeks) - Log files tend to fill up a disk quickly. scankill has been created for you to automatically remove old TeleFlow logfiles and recordings from specified directories.
Backups
- Software: (every 1 year) - Ensure all components that are required for the operation of the system are written down and kept in a safe place off the computer in question. Keep an image of the last installed software. Install routines may include TeleFlow, Apache, PHP, MySQL, FileZilla and others.
Maintenance Mode
For some maintenance procedures, your TeleFlow Server may actually stay running but other services that are relied upon to provide accurate information to your callers may not be available. For example, your database server may be unavailable due to maintenance. Consult the article on Maintenance Mode for best-practices for handling calls while dependent services are unavailable.
