System Administration

GreenArrow, like most software, will perform at its best when the underlying hardware and operating system are working properly. Because of this, it is essential that your server OS and hardware are properly maintained.

While this is not an exhaustive list, we recommend you complete the following as part of your regularly scheduled maintenance to help maintain optimal operation of your GreenArrow server:

• Keep your OS and GreenArrow up to date - we recommend this be done at least quarterly
• Check hardware for possible failures, and ideally implement some sort of automated server monitoring to catch those problems before they become critical
• Set up your disks using RAID for increased performance and redundancy to protect against data loss when a disk fails.
• Implement security tools like a Firewall and Fail2Ban to block unauthorized traffic to your server
• Use only secure passwords for access to your web interface and your SMTP Authorization (even for testing accounts) and change your passwords from time to time
• Rotate your passwords periodically
• Verify your Unmanaged Backups are running without errors (you are taking backups, right?)

Not every team has the technical resources to do all of the above but that does not mean these tasks can be ignored.

If you find yourself unable to perform these tasks, we recommend finding a system administrator who can perform them for you. We also offer a Server Management & Backups service which will allow us to manage many of those items for you.

This kind of maintenance is so critically important to the functionality of your GreenArrow software that there are times when we are unable to provide support until these issues are resolved.

For example, if GreenArrow is performing slowly and your system is logging disk or memory errors, we can not provide troubleshooting support until those errors are resolved. Even if it may seem like these underlying issues may not be directly responsible for the reported issue, they need to be fixed before we are able to perform troubleshooting so we can completely rule out hardware issues as the source of the problem.

Beyond our troubleshooting, hardware problems can cause deeper (and far more critical) problems than impacting performance. These can lead to data corruption or complete system failure, at which time in most cases your only option is to perform a restoration from a backup taken before the problem started (which could be days, or even weeks old).