The Dovetail Hosting environments will be undergoing maintenance beginning at 9:00pm EST on Thursday, July 13, 2006, lasting approximately 4 hours. Due to the nature of this maintenance, there may be downtime. Dovetail's A.V.O.I.D. services will not be affected.

While that paragraph is something that our clients receive in their email, not many really know what goes on the second Thursday of every month.

To prepare for the evening's work, Thursday morning we begin to determine what patches need to be installed, what don't, and what patches may cause issues for our clients and products, like DovetailWRP.  For example, we might not install a Media Player security patch on our servers but will definitely install a security patch for Internet Information Service (IIS).  Using tools such as the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) for the Windows computers and yum for the Linux servers, we create a list of patches for our production servers.

Just prior to the start of our maintenance, we make sure that the A.V.O.I.D. service is online and functioning properly.  While you can discover the nitty-gritty of A.V.O.I.D. on our website, in a nutshell the service brings up a maintenance webpage whenever the live web server is unavailable.  It allows the customers who subscribe to the A.V.O.I.D. service to have important information (such as contact phone numbers) always available even if the website isn't.

Once the clock hits 9:00pm EST, we begin applying patches to the production Linux and Windows servers from the lists we created earlier in the day.  This isn't as easy as it seems.  You may be used to applying patches to your home computer and rebooting several minutes later.  Imagine doing that not only to an entire office of workstations, but also a room full of servers.  It tends to take us several hours to finish the job.

The rest of the evening is allocated for general maintenance.  One month, it might be as simple as updating the network map on the wall and sweeping up the server rooms.  Other times, such as this month, we begin to implement recommendations from our Quarterly Network Assessment.  Generally, we use the extra time after patching is completed to put into production our ideas and procedures which have been developed and staged on our test servers. 

While the monthly maintenance is important, it's only one piece of the puzzle.  We try to stay ahead of the curve by monitoring security email and discussion forums, watching for trends in the industry, and networking with friends and colleagues across the IT spectrum. 

All our efforts help Dovetail provide our clients the best support possible.

   --ben