Preventative Maintenance Schedules?

[Mike Jipping]

When I worked on Vaxen, I heard our site's DEC rep comment -- as he
stopped in for the monthly preventative maintenance checks -- "a healthy
machine get rebooted at least once a month".  As I see machines in faculty
offices stay up 1 and 2 and 3 months at a shot, I wonder about
preventative maintenance (PM) on Suns.

I know about "fsck" and "sysdiag" and FPA checkers and a few others --
mostly Sun-supplied -- and I use them to check our machines.  What I'm
wondering is this: is there a specific routine for PM that administrators
do on a regular basis?  If so, (1) what programs are run? (2) how often?
(3) is the process automated (i.e., could an operator-type run the PM as a
shell script)?  This can be answered for individual machines and for
networks (doing PM *across* and *on* the network).

I'm also interested in finding out what diagnostic programs people use to
maintain/trouble-shoot systems that are not supplied by Sun.  

Send responses to me and I'll summarize to the net.  I'm putting such a PM
schedule together and the info would be REAL handy --> and I'm sure it
would be to others as well.  Thanks.

      Mike Jipping
      Hope College
      Department of Computer Science
      jipping at cs.hope.edu