Information Systems:DarrenF's Monthly Manual Tasks

This page describes what manual tasks DarrenF does at the beginning of each month, usually the first weekday after the first of each month.

• The log files that MDaemon generate on the Mail server need to be moved to the SuperServer. The log files are the daily collection of text files that MDaemon zips up and stores in its log folder. Those zip files can be up to a GB for 30 days so they need to be moved to the Tech folder on the SuperServer so that the hard drive on Mail doesn't fill up. If the hard drive does fill up on the Mail server, MDaemon will stop passing email inbound and outbound.
• The same needs to be done for the MDaemon configuration files which are zipped up in the MDaemon\config folder. They are much smaller than the log files but they do need to be moved to the SuperServer for archival reasons. These config files can be used to revert back to a previous setup of MDaemon. They are useful if configuration changes were made that broke something but you don't want to or can't restore from a tape backup.
• The FTP logs on the Mail server are now much smaller - used to be bigger than a GB per file but they were changed in the summer of 2016 to be per user. If the log files are big and are taking up too much disk space, then they can also be moved to the Tech folder on the SuperServer.
• The Infoblox appliances send their own backups to an FTP account on Mail and although the files are small, they need to be moved to the SuperServer for archival reasons in the Tech folder.
• When an email order is sent to UWD, a copy of the raw email is made by MDaemon and dropped into the EMorder folder on the Mail server. There are a bunch of folders organized by year and month that the email order copies need to be moved into. The reason for this is that a Windows machine will encounter reduced performance when trying to access a folder with tens of thousands of files in it. To avoid this the email order copies from each month are moved out of the drop folder into corresponding month folder inside the year folder. Then that months worth of email order copies is zipped up so that the performance of tape backups are not reduced. The backup software can perform much quicker is sending 12 zip files to tape rather than 10,000+ 1 kilobyte files. It's a matter of overhead. Unfortunately, the individual order files are stored in a second location in addition to the EMorder folder so the tidying up of the email copies needs to be done twice. The second location is in the user account folder for uni_orders@unipharm.com. When we decommission email orders completely at some point in the future, this manual tidy up process won't need to be done.
• There is an installation of Kiwi Syslog on the Thermoprofile server. The log files are large and need to be moved to the Tech folder on the SuperServer. These logs are not reviewed often and it would not be a huge loss if the collection of them were to be stopped, however, in the event of a problem with hardware that does send traps to Kiwi Syslog, there might be the important clues to failures in those logs and that is why they continue.
• On the same Thermoprofile server, Spiceworks creates its own zipped up backup files in a folder within Spiceworks. Those zip files can be deleted as they are on multiple tapes and just take up hard drive space.
• On the SuperServer there are two shared folders for the logs and configuration files that the Sophos firewall creates. The logs are compressed tar files and they need to be moved from the drop folder to the corresponding monthly and yearly sub folders. The configuration files are .abf files and are emailed to webmaster@unipharm.com on a daily basis. Once per month the abf file attachments are stripped out of the emails and archived in the Astaro Backups folder on the SuperServer. The abf files are critical to restoring the configuration of the Sophos firewall if an appliance(s) have hard drive failure.