Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

11.8. Preventive Administration Tasks

Many times when looking at the cause of a problem with customers during the aftermath of a serious outage, it is found that simple preventive administration could have either stopped the problem altogether or ensured that it was discovered before causing an outage. This section covers the things that, in my experience, tend to be done only after a serious problem has been experienced. If the customer is lucky, this will be on a staging or development environment; unfortunately for some, this often happens in production. Time and time again, I see customers with problems that have affected their project and sometimes their business that could have been avoided had they taken the time to do some regular preventive administration of their system.

11.8.1. Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer

The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) has identified many issues for me onsite that customers typically miss, such as missing service packs on SQL Server and service accounts that are running with local administrator privileges. This is one of the first tools that I use when performing a Supportability Review of an environment. MBSA checks one or more machine's security updates against those from the Microsoft Update catalog. You can use MBSA to scan all the Microsoft Windows machines in the environment (for example, BizTalk, SQL Server, and any other Windows machine that BizTalk could potentially communicate with, such as SharePoint or IIS). In ...