Microsoft Word Hardware Reconfiguration Methodology V final2

Requirements for system maintenance

Before proceeding with any system maintenance, there are certain requirements that should be met. No system changes should have been made until these requirements are ascertained. Doing otherwise may result in an operable system that would have to be restored from backup media. The following is non-exhaustive list but does cover many of the various issues that are important to this section. Consider the following:

1. 
   What requires maintenance? Does the operating system require it or do various components, applications, libraries, and/or other packages require it? Prepare a list detailing specifically requires maintenance. If enough components require maintenance then it is likely a good decision to proceed with system maintenance.
   

2. 
   Determine which type of maintenance is to occur. If only a small number of changes or modifications must be made to the system then manual system maintenance may be more appropriate. If many changes are to occur then an update should occur. If updates are no longer available or certain new technical innovations or fixes are available in the upgrade then it may be necessary to perform an upgrade.
   

3. 
   Are all license issues resolved? Has the operating system been re-licensed (this has the potential to happen) as updating or upgrading to it would cause the current operating system to fall under the new licenses jurisdiction.
   

4. 
   If manual system maintenance is to be applied then it is important to determine if any changes have been made to the software licenses and their corresponding software packages. Software packages modified by the maintainer’s updates or upgrades are the maintainer’s legal responsibility. However, software packages that are manually maintained whose underlying license has changed remains the legal problem of the customer.
   

5. 
   Is the test laboratory environment ready for use? Is the test computer’s hardware and software installed and working? Before changes are ever deployed to the operational
   

network they should always be tested and verified on a non-operational network that can be experimented on.

6. 
   Have system diagnostics been run on the hardware? Diagnostics should be run prior to performing an update or upgrade as a hardware bug could cause the entire process to come to a halt and even corrupt the operating system. In addition, certain hardware configuration checks should be made in order to ascertain that the system is in good working order including verifying the system’s log files for any hardware-related issues.
   

7. 
   It is important to verify the system’s logs and determine that there are no outstanding errors or bugs unless the purpose of maintenance is to fix those specific issues.
   

8. 
   Has the software and operating systems on the test hardware been tested to determine if they are functional? Is the operating system in a functional state? A system in proper working condition is easier to maintain than an unstable system.
   

9. 
   Have backups been successfully completed? It is important that backups be available as nay failed attempt at performing system maintenance could require the reloading of system data from backup media. It is important to ensure that backups are done periodically for both the laboratory testing facility and the operational network.
   

10. 
    Are the test users ready for testing the system after system maintenance is performed? If system maintenance will have a visible impact on the users or the way they work it will important to test what changes they will experience and whether the changes are more conducive or a hindrance. If the changes are more of a hindrance then the changes should be rolled back.
    

11. 
    Is the system administrator(s) ready to proceed with the system maintenance? Does he have everything he requires? It is important that the system administrator and his support staff be ready to proceed with the system maintenance modifications and that all materials (i.e. update/upgrade media, backups, etc.) are available should they be required.
    

12. 
    Is the operating system ready to receive an update, upgrade, or manual system maintenance? Are applications and services disabled? Have users logged off from the system? It is common practice before performing system maintenance that any application or service that may be affected be disabled and that users who would be affected be logged off from the system. In addition, it may be necessary to bring the system to single-user mode or even boot from special media if performing an update or upgrade.
    

The following is non-exhaustive list but it does cover many of the various issues that are important to this section.

4.