Best Practice Questions

[pakman]

I am wondering what the recommendation would be on the following.

1. Do folks use the reboot schedule and if so should this be done nightly, weekly, or monthly? same question for scheduling backups and scheduling IDS sync
2. Should I program voice quality monitoring?
3. I came across the Device Connectivity form should I go through and ACK all the lines in there?

If there are other common maintenance best practices you would like to share I would appreciate it.

thanks,

[ZuluAlpha]

I think many of these answers depend on your tolerance for service outages and the amount of changes that happen. If you make dozens of changes per day, a daily backup may make more sense. If it's a few per week, maybe a weekly would be better. I wouldn't stretch it longer than that - but again if you're not making any changes you may not need it. That's only for scheduled backups. I still make manual backups before and I after I make significant changes.

If you don't have 24/7 users you could reboot overnight monthly. I haven't heard of a particular need to do it any more frequently than that. Maybe every quarter or so I have users that need to reboot due to a memory issue or database restore and that's the only time they generally do it.

[VinceWhirlwind]

Controllers don't need scheduled reboots.
 
My flakiest controller - a 3300 with 400-odd users, is currently showing an uptime of 214 days.
One other one I just checked has an uptime of 411 days - which was when it was upgraded to v7.2

[petr.necas]

I agree with VinceWhirlwind, there is no need to do scheduled reboots....none of our customers ever needed this.

What I start occasionally is the SIP TCPDUMP, because sometimes customers want to resolve some calling issues that happened few day ago.

I prefer scheduling daily backups, you never know.

I also schedule DBMS check every night.

Daily exporting of SMDR data might be also a good idea.

[VinceWhirlwind]

I also schedule DBMS check every night.

Yes!
I can't remember if this was in the doco somewhere or whether Mitel told us to do it, but we have every controller doing this every morning at 4am.

[pakman]

Thanks for the feedback.

I also schedule DBMS check every night.

Daily exporting of SMDR data might be also a good idea.

When you schedule the DBMS check does that export it's findings to an FTP server or can it email you the results?
Thanks,

[x-man]

I think there is a Mitel doc somewhere that tells you which releases of software require regular scheduled reboots. Early ones certainly needed at least weekly scheduled reboots but they got less and less as releases came and went. If you look at the schedules in maintenance commands you can mostly work it out.

[ZuluAlpha]

Thanks for the feedback.

I also schedule DBMS check every night.

Daily exporting of SMDR data might be also a good idea.

If a DMBS Check results in an issue, it will put the controller in to alarm to let you know.
When you schedule the DBMS check does that export it's findings to an FTP server or can it email you the results?
Thanks,

[petr.necas]

One more thing that came to my mind, I saw few installations that had all the feature access codes set their default values. I think that is too dangerous because users may accidentally dial some of the FACs codes and e.g. put some extension to DND. My best practice is to program only those FACs that are needed. What do you think?

[acejavelin]

One more thing that came to my mind, I saw few installations that had all the feature access codes set their default values. I think that is too dangerous because users may accidentally dial some of the FACs codes and e.g. put some extension to DND. My best practice is to program only those FACs that are needed. What do you think?

I always just let the MiCW build them in almost all new installs... I see no reason not to set most codes, in the last few years I can only think of one or two times I have seen an accidental activation of a feature that isn't station to station messaging.

[x-man]

Just had one yesterday. *02 for make busy - set. Local numbers start with 02. Quite how they managed to hit the star instead of 9 is beyond me though.