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Monthly Archives: January 2020

Setting Up A Scheduled Task Server and Automatic Tasks

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As a follow-up to this regular and manual maintenance tasks post, let’s focus on tasks that are scheduled and automated. To make management a bit easier, there are a few things that I like to do before setting up the first task.

Setting Up A Scheduled Task Server

First, where possible – run your tasks from a central dedicated VM with dedicated user(s) accounts. In the past, I’ve setup these tasks on my workstation with my user. When my machine messed up or I changed my password (or any other number of things), the tasks stopped working. Now, I like to use a VM with dedicated service users delegated the permissions required for their task. For example, you might have a user for AD changes, SCCM management, and syncing to outside services. Or you might be comfortable with one account delegated only the permissions that it needs. Either way, your service account(s) most likely do not need domain admin permissions and should not be used elsewhere.

Second, make sure that you have a backup strategy for your maintenance machine. We often forget to include these types of side servers in DR plans. As you centralize tasks, they become critical to your environment.

Automatic Tasks for Your Server

Here is a list of tasks that I have running. Item without a link are custom scripts that I haven’t polished enough to publish here. 🙂

Those are the main tasks that keep our environment humming along. What automatic tasks do you use?

Tasks – Weekly, Monthly, Biyearly Checklist

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I am a sucker for a good checklist! To keep things running smoothly in our environment, I work through a weekly, monthly, and 6-month maintenance check. While some of these items won’t be applicable to your environment, I hope that sharing them will give you a few ideas to make your organization run a bit better!

Items on this list are not completely scripted or are things that I want a physical set of eyes on regularly. You won’t see things like stale AD computer and user cleanup because these things are fully automated already. Next week’s post will highlight those types of tasks.

Weekly To-Do

Security

Servers

  • Check DFS reports between File Servers
  • Check volume usage and rate of growth
  • Any critical errors in Server Manager Events?
  • Check SCCM component status
  • Check AppLocker errors on servers

Network

DR

  • Check on GPO backup
  • Check Backup Logs/Storage Space
  • Check RAID status on remote servers

Monthly To-Do

  • Software Updates

Biyearly To-Do

SCCM

• Run Find and Create Device Models Script
• Run Find and Create BIOS Versions Script

• Set age in comments attribute for each new model collection
• Add new models to Model | Less than 5 years old collection
• Add any models 5 years or older to the Model | 5 years or older

These last three steps are used for state reporting. When combined with collections that identify primary user type of a device, we can quickly see the number of staff and student devices by OS and by their age group (less than five years old / five years or older).

Active Directory Health

Backup and Firmware Upgrades

Servers

DR

And that is it! If you have questions about a specific task or want to share your maintenance schedule, feel free to leave a comment!