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Questions tagged [best-practices]

Questions asking for best practices in a given field. Be aware, that sometimes there might be no generally accepted best practices, in which case the question is likely to be closed for being subjective.

351 questions
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How bad is it to run Exchange 2016 on a Windows 2012 R2 domain controller for a small organization with assuredly fewer than 25 users?

I know that it has been officially unsupported forever and yet I have seen or heard about many small business installations of a single host running AD DS and Exchange simultaneously. For a resource-strapped small business the savings are…
tacos_tacos_tacos
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A secure, standard iptables rule-set for a basic HTTP(s) webserver

I have been trying to put together a basic server iptables script that will work for most sites just running a basic webserver using HTTP(S) and SSH (ports 80, 443, & 22). After all, most VPS only need these starting ports rules and can add mail or…
Xeoncross
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Best practices for file layout in a Hyper-V server?

We've got a Hyper-V server set up, and the layout of the files is inconsistent because it was set up by several people. Here are the two different "templates" that were used: Template 1 D:\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines\MACHINE_NAME_1\Virtual Hard…
Benjamin Peikes
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IT lead does not have a backup, DR plan in writing

This is a general management question to IT managers out there. We are a small firm with about 4 servers in our colo cabinent. No full time IT manager. But we do have one person on monthly contract and I am having a terrible time getting him to…
Alex
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In Puppet, how would I secure a password variable (in this case a MySQL password)?

I am using Puppet to provision MySQL with a parameterised class: class mysql::server( $password ) { package { 'mysql-server': ensure => installed } package { 'mysql': ensure => installed } service { 'mysqld': …
Belmin Fernandez
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What Are The Best Practices For Business Folder Structure?

We've tended in the past towards having departmental folders (Sales, Marketing, etc) on a single share and then adding folders below these ad-hoc as and when they're needed. It's gotten a bit messy - I've been tasked with creating a 'folder…
jidl
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How can I load-balance a load balancer?

I'm about to convert a single-server single-database web application into a physically distributed high-available configuration with servers on two physical locations (for now). Now, obviously, I need a load balancer (more like a reverse proxy in…
Nikolai Prokoschenko
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Server room wiring questions

I'm looking at rewiring our server room to be more presentable, organized, and easier to troubleshooting. Right now we currently have 4 HP racks (don't know the model right now). We do not have a building UPS so we are placing UPS's in each rack…
Jacob
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Outlook Email Abuse - Guide for email etiquette?

I've spent a lot of time performing mail migrations for companies that either had very little IT focus, or no fulltime staff to handle common issues. As a result, policies governing email use and best-processes were never instituted. The end-users…
ewwhite
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Best practice for automated Linux updates

We are working on a way to perform automatic updates for our RHEL/RHEL-based servers. Initial idea: Using Puppet, we disable the default repositories and point to our own. Then, we use ensure => latest for the packages we want to automatically…
Belmin Fernandez
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Best practices for settings for Oracle database creation

When installing an Oracle Database, what non-default settings would you normally apply (or consider applying) ? I'm not after hardware dependent setting (eg memory allocation) or file locations, but more general items. Similarly anything that is a…
Gary
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The impact of Apache graceful restarts and user experience

Is it safe to perform a graceful restart of Apache on a production server? What effects will a graceful restart cause and what would be the impact (if any)? Will there be any detrimental impacts (e.g. downtime, even if it is for a short time)? I…
stellarchariot
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Nagios server best practices?

I run a medium-sized Nagios server. It monitors roughly 40 servers with 180 services currently and is only growing by the day. I migrated from an old Nagios setup that was configured in a very esoteric fashion, forcing me to reconfigure everything…
Michael Pobega
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Best strategy to keep chef cookbooks versions under control

I'm looking for ideas about chef cookbooks versions management. I know that you pin specific versions in the environment, but I'm not sure how to go about it. We use librarian-chef which installs 3rd party community books into the cookbooks folder.…
gansbrest
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Tips to gracefully take over a (UNIX) production server

After months of neglect, e-mail flames and management battles our current sysadmin was fired and handed over "the server credentials" to me. Such credentials consist in a root password and nothing else: no procedures, no documentation, no tips,…
lorenzog
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