iwfsck and iwfsshrink - Best Practices

Trey

Hi,

I have never used either of these tools before on our environment and someone mentioned to me we are putting ourselves at a risk by not regularly checking our backing store. They also said we could save a significant disk space if we ran the [size=4][size=2]iwfsshrink every once and a while.[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]I am looking for some advice on how often we should be running these tools. I would say our teamsite server is fairly active and maintains a fair amount of traffic, but not as high a level of traffic as I am sure some of you have. I would say there are at least 3 contributors logged in and actively updating content all day at a minimum, but it can have up to 15-20 concurrent users active at a time.[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]Current backing store size is 12.8 GB[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]We are running:[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]TeamSite 6.5 (no sp)[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]Windows 2003[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]Direct fiber connection to a EMC Cellera for iw-mount[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]Other apps on server OpenDeploy and we have a separate Tomcat 5 instance to virtulize our jsp sites. [/size]

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[size=4][size=2]Anybody have any thoughts on this?[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]Thanks,[/size]

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[size=4][size=2]Trey Wentz
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Adam Stoller

I'd recommend running iwfsshrink once a quarter - you can schedule it to run via the Windows Scheduler most likely. The nice thing about this tool is that it runs while TeamSite is up - so if you also have backups scheduled in which you take the server down and then bring it up afterwards, schedule the iwfsshrink to run right after you bring the server back up on the first of each quarter (or something like that).

How frequently to run iwfsck depends a lot on how you do backups, whether you use mirrors, etc.

Assuming a fairly simplistic system with no online backup of the backing store - you'd have to schedule the iwfsck to run on the backing store while TeamSite is down - perhaps starting on Saturday or Sunday morning? Of course this has to be fit in with your up-time requirements for the server - in general, you can probably do this once a quarter, or even once every 6 months.

If you create a copy of the backing store on-line before backing it up to tape (usually done to reduce downtime of the TeamSite server) - then you can run it more frequently, on the copy. Anywhere from nightly (after the copy is made) to once every 6 months (I think this is a reasonable max time span, though I know places where they run it less than once a year...)

iwfsshrink does not produce a log file, but when the run is over (and during the run) you can use the 'status' option to get information about what it's done.

iwfsck should be run with the '-d' option and the output should be captured in a log file - which should be scanned after running to look for any reports of errors.

Probably a good idea to tie iwfsck and possibly iwfsshrink to a script that will send an email summry to the TS system administrator.