House Keeping Policy For HP-UX Systems

[sriharikumar_1]

Hi,

Can anyone prescribe a House Keeping Policy for the HP-UX Systems i.e., regular log file maintenance, regular sys admin tasks which needs to be conducted.

Please give your suggestion/ideas on this to make a better procedure.
In case any known policy is available for the same, please mention it.

Servers : L1000, R390 and A class
Workstation : B1000

Thanks and Regards.

[Edward Sedgemore]

Theres been lots of question similar to this before. To see all the replies do search in the forums for housekeeping.

Basically your policy should be;

1. Clean out /tmp and /var/tmp regularly.
2. Keep output from bdf weekly so you can compare to see if space usage is creeping up.
3. You should have a cron job which does a dmesg - every 5 mins or so which appends to /var/adm/messages (and in /etc/mail/aliases root email redirected to your personal email account for alarms etc.)
4. Check syslog regularly.
5. Check diagnostic logs (logtool) in STM (xstm) weekly.
6. Check bad login attempts weekly (lastb)

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

Here's a good thread with suggestions and links to others:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x7fcff841489fd4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

...JRF...

[Rita C Workman]

Here's my one housekeeping policy...
Follow any and all suggestions in the other threads to clean up logs....keep after programmers and dba's to keep their directories cleaned up.

And BEFORE any cleanups....make sure I have solid backups on everything !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And oh yes.....as much of this you can automate in scripts...do it. Remember, scripted once and cron'd..and it's done for all the next times.

[Shannon Petry]

There are lots of variables on how much and what apps the servers are running as well as the users you have connecting.
Some users are good about keeping up their directories and maintaing their own stuff. I have a site where users actually clean up their files in /tmp and /var/tmp. (IMAGINE THAT ONE!)

An oracle server will require lots of log maintenance for oracle, but very little "user" disk space monitoring. A file server will require much less log maintenance, but constant and chronic disk useage by user.
(I suggest setting up hard quota limits disabeling accounts that go over their limit) Ha Ha Ha! I wish I could really do that one! :)
If a server is connected to the internet, then you will want to monitor syslog very often. If the system is on a private network then there will be little need to monitor syslog thouroughly.

Anyway, once you know what your servers are doing and how they are connected, then you should have an idea of what needs to be done.

I usually recommend setting up a cron job for cleaning up /tmp and /var/tmp most other tasks can be automated as well via a script.

I use the accounting package quite frequently. This adds lots of disk space to /var/adm, but gives me loads of nice information. I automate everything on in a single script for accounting, as well as fixing permissions on 100+ users directories and files each night, cleaning up core files, removing rhosts files, netrc files, etc...

I think you get the idea though....

Regards,
Shannon