Best practices for multiple admins on ArcGIS Server and IIS

Question

What are best practices for having multiple Administrators of ArcGIS Server? I ask in terms of one admin starting and stopping services while another admin is deleting/creating/stopping different services and other similar situations?

If best, line out scenarios to avoid and best practices. Thanks.

Answer 1

I've dealt with this before, and it can be a real pain at times. Some points to think about:

• Consecutive logins: Our IT staff limited the number of consecutive logins on a box (production, dev, and testing) to two. So if for some reason your Sys Admin is on the box and one of your GIS admins is also, you aren't getting on. So, be polite, get on the box, do your work, then get back off. This is particularly problematic if your logins don't timeout, which is a whole other issue.
• Login timeouts: When we first setup our servers, a default policy was to timeout logins - after you were logged on for so many minutes, hours whatever, you got booted off. A security issue and to keep admins from staying logged onto 50 different servers just for their convenience. But we had long-running jobs that needed the account to be logged on for, so we got them to change that policy for us, which wasn't easy to do.
• Communication: Communication among the different admins is crucial, especially if you are not sitting next to one another or maybe even at different locations. We had our email admin set us up a email group that had four or five of us in it. If one of us needed to bounce a server or do pretty much anything to or on one of our boxes, we would email the group.