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Epilogue (or is that Epitaph?)

You now have everything running smoothly or we would hope. What's next? That I leave to you. There are many things you can and may want to do with your site but you should realise it will have its limits. Don't expect to be able to do everything under the sun, you will find something will break at some point.

To give you an idea of what can be done on one PC, I have a PIII 600Mhz with 256Mgs running IIS with 9 webs, ftp server, one smtp gateway, Exchange server. Webcam site with 5 cams, two cams run off the above server. The server also has a number of other apps running in the background mainly for housekeeping, logging and alarming for when something fails which emails and SMS's me with any issues. It also acts as my file server and collects MIS (phone system) information.

The webs have a discussion forum database using MSAccess database, a number of mailing list databases of which one swamped the smtp mail server not long ago. I had to increase the number of concurrent sessions on the mail server to allow the mailing list to send to everyone on list (its becoming a big list!)

The system is running fairly well and response times are good. Occasionally it will grind when a number of processes run concurrently but otherwise well behaved.

I recently had an issue which caused the Exchange server to fail, had to do with Active Directory, and my only recourse was to rebuild. Thankfully I had backups but it still took a while for the system to be back to normal. In fact it took the better part 48+ hours total to get it the way I wanted it.

This shows a lot can be done on a server but be careful that you don't overdo things on your own system. Be sure that you make backups of everything, apply all patches even if they are irrelavent to the system, missing one patch then applying future patches could cost you if they are not consecutive.

Beyond this you are free to overload, burn, crash or whatever to your system, I wish happy days ahead for you.

Any comments/feedback to webmaster@nontaurus.com

Good luck and enjoy.

Phil