Sean Daily's articles about recovering essential network services, "Recovering WINS" (March 2002, InstantDoc ID 23833) and "Recovering DHCP" (September 2001, InstantDoc ID 21841), were very informative, especially the suggestions about preparing for disaster. Do you recommend a time interval (e.g., once a month, once a quarter, once a year) for performing the maintenance for those crucial services? Also, have you written any articles about preparing for disaster recovery on Windows 2000 Server or Active Directory (AD)? I'm developing a maintenance schedule and plan to implement the recommendations from your articles.



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How frequently you need to perform the maintenance services I discussed in the articles depends on the size of your organization. Large networks will have an inherently greater use of services such as WINS and DHCP than small networks will have. Thus, performing more frequent maintenance tasks on the databases these services use is important for large networks. In any case, a quarterly maintenance schedule is an absolute minimum*
a monthly schedule is a better idea for all but the smallest networks.
Search the archive on Windows & .NET Magazine's Web site (http://www.winnet
mag.com/magazine) to find other recovery-oriented articles. Look for the third part of my recovering essential services series, "Recovering AD," in an upcoming issue of the magazine.

--Sean Daily

Earl Hinkle 5/8/2002 3:03:59 PM

Sean Daily's article lists several steps to prepare for DHCP disaster. I'd like to replicate the DHCP database to another location. The article mentions using Windows 2000 or Windows NT's replication feature to perform this task. How do you do that, and which file do you replicate (e.g., dhcp.mdb in \\%systemroot%\\system32\\dhcp\\backup\\jet\\newfolder)? I was thinking of using a batch job to pull all the DHCP databases in our enterprise to one location for our administrators to access. Would you recommend that we pull the backup copy of dhcp.mdb that Win2K creates?



Rick De Bucce


I'd handle this task exactly as you suggest: Create a job on each server to stop the service, back up the current database to a centralized location (perhaps with a subfolder of the server's name or some similar method of keeping different DHCP server databases labeled and separated), and restart the DHCP service. The location you mentioned would be the backup of the database*you'll probably want to back up the current version of dhcp.mdb in the \\%systemroot%\\system32\\dhcp folder.



Sean Daily


Rick De Bucce 2/5/2002 11:20:41 AM