newbie question

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Sunday, April 17, 2005 11:52:36 AM -0400 SuDaNym at aol.com wrote:
>
> Can anyone give me a very rough estimate on how much time is required on
> an   ongoing basis, after a server is set up with FreeBSD and Apache, to
> maintain   everything.  By everything I am referring to everything
> required to keep  the  server up, and host about 100 domains.  Thank you
> in advance and I  apologize  if this question is not appropriate for this
> list.
>
I'm maintaining a server with three domains, running apache, squirrelmail, 
postfix, cyrus imap and saslauthd, mailman, djbdns and a perl-based 
bulletin board, and I probably spend an average of 8 hours a month doing 
server-admin type stuff.

If you set it up right, the only maintenance you have is running 
portupgrade and freebsd-update periodically, to ensure your apps don't have 
known security holes.  Make sure you have a good backup system in case a 
drive fails, and that's about it.

You can write "canary" scripts that monitor processes and attempt to 
restart them if they fail, and send you email as well.  Most of the eight 
hours is spent reading mail from cron jobs that are monitoring the server. 
FreeBSD just runs.

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu