Groove Manager best practices – protect your data

Hardware failure is one of those risks you can never quite eliminate. So what do you do to protect your Groove domain data?

The Groove Manager (or Management Server, for those of you still running 3.1) provides an administrative web interface on an IIS computer for you to administer your Groove domain. However, the data for your Groove domain -- such as who the members are, what groups they belong to, and the policies that apply to them -- resides in an SQL database on another computer. This data should be protected and backed up to help guard against data loss. You should also back up the registry keys that provide Manager with access to that data.

Your first line of defense, of course, is a robust hardware configuration. Ideally, your SQL server should have redundancy at the hardware level, such as a level 1 or level 5 RAID. You can also use SQL Server clustering, which will not only help to prevent data loss, but will provide Groove Manager with continued server access when a server is down (whether for scheduled or unscheduled maintenance). I expect that anyone who has ever administered an SQL server knows more about this topic than I do, so I won’t attempt to provide specific guidance on it, but if you want more information, there’s a good white paper at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=818234dc-a17b-4f09-b282-c6830fead499.

Outside of the registry key, nothing is stored on the IIS server computer. If you are worried about continuing access in the case of a server failure, you can use a hardware load balancer for web farms and put multiple web front ends behind it for redundancy.

Once the domain is up and running, the following actions will help to protect server data:

· Each night, back up the Groove Manager database and log files on the SQL server computer. We recommend you automate this with a scheduled task.

· Regularly review disk space usage on the SQL server. If the GMS database and log run out of space, the Manager will stop responding. Our documentation recommends that you allow 6 MB of storage per managed Groove user for an environment that averages 5 transactions per user per hour.

· Any time you create a certificate or private key, create a backup copy in a secure location that is not on the same machine. For example, you could store the data on a removable disk or flash drive, and then put that device in a physically secure place, or you could copy the data to a folder on a secure private network.

· Keep old keys after you create newer ones. If a client has an older data recovery key, you will need the same key to recover data on that client.

· Remember your passwords

· After installation, back up the registry keys that provide Manager with access to the SQL database. As with certificates, put that backup in a secure location. Here are the key locations, by version:

o For 2007: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Groove\ManagementServer

o For 3.x: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Groove Networks, Inc.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Great post, explained really well and I could really understand. Thank you.