AD Maintenance, First Year Network Admin

[netadmin55]

I just have a general question about maintaining a healthy Active Directory database. I have read some material online and perform the following routines to ensure stability in our AD environment.

• I run a backup of the system state once a week on my AD Server that has the FSMO roles.
• Check on the replication of all 5 AD Servers
• Try not to have computers in the general computers OU
• Check the event logs periodically, but not sure how important this is

Can anyone offer me any advice as to whether or not I should be performing any other routine maintenance to the AD environment. This is my first year being the Network Admin so I am still learning the ropes.

 

[JCB1]

Do you use GPO's ??? Do you back these up??

Does DNS run on one server or replicate to all servers?

We monitor our servers health with opmanager http://www.opmanager.co.uk/index.html you can also monitor the event log so you will get an e-mail or SMS when an alert is active. Not sure if you would be intrested in this??

 

[netadmin55]

Does the GPO's get backed up in the system state?

We have one primary DNS server and the others are set as a seconday dns server, At least this is what I understand, they were just brought online with DCPromo with no specific DNS configs.

 

[jupiler]

tip: don't run backups on your domain controller, a restore of a DC is useless (it will give you troubles when restoring it) and i experienced myself that backup software can destroy your DC: the volume shadow copy service might corrupt your DC

 

[netadmin55]

Then how should you back up AD?

 

[JCB1]

Does the GPO's get backed up in the system state?

yes they do, I prefer to back them up manually as well

We have one primary DNS server and the others are set as a seconday dns server, At least this is what I understand, they were just brought online with DCPromo with no specific DNS configs.

that is right, if youe primary server fails you can simply promote another DNS server to be the primary.