[H-GEN] Exchange Woes

[Adrian Sutton]

Thanks for the suggestions all.  To clarify a few things:

* We actually have some pretty serious backup software, specifically 
Veritas NetBackup which backs up to a bank of tapes each night.  The 
trouble has been that Active Directory doesn't restore easily, 
essentially requiring everything to be exactly the same as when the 
backup was taken or it just causes the entire server to bluescreen and 
then you have to reinstall the system.  We also use the builtin 
NTBackup and it did the same thing on restoration.

* While everyone is using Outlook at the moment it wouldn't be too big 
an issue to change to a different client as long as it was easy to use.

> Not sure if you've used Unix in production environments much but for 
> the
> most part the systems just don't break.  Infact this sometimes leads
> people to ignore them for months on end but it is important to always 
> keep
> up with security updates[2].

Our windows systems don't break for the most part, but every so often 
every system goes bad, I'd like something that comes good again easier. 
  We lost a hard drive in our e250 a few weeks ago but it (fortunately) 
had raid and could easily be replaced and resynced.  One of the steps 
we've taken is mandated that all servers must use RAID drives which 
should help significantly.

> I want to concur with Sarah Holling's suggestion of getting in a 
> Sysadmin
> (fulltime, parttime or contract).

I completely agree, though you actually have to get a good one too.  
One of the problems we have is that there's really only one or two 
hours work a week for a sysadmin here but we need them to be there when 
we need them to do something.  That tends to make it quite expensive to 
have anyone around.  Personally I'd prefer that we get someone in to 
set things up and then get some training for one or two of the 
programmers to be able to perform the routine maintenance - check logs, 
check backups, run apt-get upgrade.  Then someone can come in once 
every month or two check things are all going smoothly and do a test 
run of the backups - I guess that counts as on contract...

I'd also like to point out that I'm well aware of the importance of 
backup plans - I just don't actually have the experience required to 
put together one that's effective - nor do I have time as it's outside 
my role in the company.  I've been pushing to get someone in or train 
someone to be able to do this though.  Just so you didn't think I was 
totally incompetent (rather than just mostly incompetent).

Anyway, I'll take a look into the suggestions offered - the other 
option we're looking into is outsourcing the handling of our exchange 
systems.  There are a number of companies in the starts that will run 
exchange on their servers for a low monthly fee.

For those interested in how the restore is going - the Solaris box 
running PC-NetLink seems to have saved our bacon and has now taken over 
as the primary domain controller complete with all our login info 
intact.  It appears to have been a secondary controller for some time 
but wasn't running any login services.  We may yet get out of this 
without any data loss. :)

Regards,

Adrian Sutton
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