Maintenance Windows

One of your first responsibilities as a Unix system administrator is to specify your organization's maintenance window—the time reserved for routine scheduled maintenance tasks such as rebooting routers, upgrading servers, adding disk drives, and so on. Maintenance windows specify a time when service is not guaranteed so that administrators have time to fix minor problems or upgrade servers.

Routine work such as hardware racking and application installation can be done outside of the maintenance window. But if you are planning to do any work that requires system downtime, or even if you are planning to do work that has only a slight chance of bringing something down, do it during the maintenance window. You'll save yourself ...

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