Hello everyone,
I found this community helpful many times before, and I`m testing my luck again This time I would appreciate some guidelines regarding proper network maintenance plan. I basically want to propose this to our management and senior IT personnel (no, they never though of it), and have much more pleasant working time for myself.
So far, I managed to collect some of the pieces, but would greately appreciate additional comments by more experienced guys and galls around here. Is there anything I missed? Some best-practice I didn`t know about? How do you do it?
Schedule maintenance window for any non-critical tasks. Make sure most recent backup configs exist before changing anything in the network.
Keep it electronic. Have centralized backup configs. Enable TFTP on the network and manually, or using archive, backup configs from all the devices one a week. Have syslog server running as well.
Enable NTP server in the network. Schedule IOS upgrades and make sure all devices run same IOS versions. Test backup configs in scheduled maintenance window.
Schedule physical maintenance once every 3 months. Open all the devices, clean the dust and arrange the cables. Consult management for plan
regarding spare devices and MTBF (meantime before failure)
- Have monitoring system in place
We have Zenoss partially running. Plan so far is to get it fully working and SNMP monitoring all the devices.
I know this is just a novice approach, and that is exactly the reason why I`m asking you - what should I add/consider in order to create any decent maintenance plan?
