Chapter 12: Backing Up

Chapter 12 dealt with something that many of us don't do often enough: backing up. In truth, the importance of backup is directly proportional to the importance of the data being backed up. My save game files in Dragon Age: Origins are not exactly critical data, for example. The chapter and class lecture covered several different ways of backing up, be it from the GUI console or the command line, but the takeaway I have from this chapter is that I really should invest in a third-party utility if I want to back up data on servers. The Windows Server options are pretty basic.

Chapter 11: Monitoring Servers

Chapter 11 dealt with, shock of shocks, monitoring servers. (Gee, bet you weren't expecting that from the title!) In any case, the lab had me mostly in the reliability and performance utrility, building different graphs and data collectors. The most important takeaway from this lesson was, at least to me:  Be careful what you put on the same graph. Things that are percentage based will only have a value of 0-100 (Sadly for the Spinal Taps of the computing world, the hardware in a PC, even a server, does not go to 11.) whereas other things will be measured in units that can go WAY past 100. However, even if you do put things with different ceilings together on the same graph, you'll still at least be able to see where the spikes are.

Chapter 10: Managing Servers

Chapter 10 dealt with the day-to-day tasks of managing a server and keeping it in good shape, such as updates and remote access. The lab was one of the lightest and fastest of the entire semester; there's just not all that much to, for instance, Remote Desktop from a user standpoint, though it is a very useful feature. (I use it a bit at home to play around with my mostly-unused server - I need to get some more storage for that thing one of these days so I can use it as a file and media server, because right now, I don't have much else in the way of use for it.)

Chapter 9: Securing Infrastructure Services

Chapter 9 dealt with some of the higher-level types of security, such as Certificates and Certificate Authorities as well as VPNs and remote access. Of these two concepts, I must admit I find remote access to be of considerably greater interest; while Certificates are extremely important for security purposes, the idea of being able to securely access my home network while out roaming around has always appealed to me. Maybe I've found a use for my languishing server box after all.