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To protect your Exchange 2000 organisation against problems that hardware and software vendors have identified and corrected, keep your servers up-to-date with the latest software updates (such as hardware drivers and software patches) and firmware updates (such as basic input/output system [BIOS] updates). Most software and hardware vendors have Web sites that provide software and firmware updates for their products.
It is recommended that you regularly download the latest Windows 2000 software updates. Some Windows 2000 updates fix known problems or provide security enhancements. To download the latest Windows 2000 software updates, see the Microsoft Windows Update Web site at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=6549. Note You should deploy software and firmware updates in a test server environment before you install these updates on your production servers. Before you update software and firmware on your production servers, ensure that you can back out of any update if problems occur.
You can back out of some of these updates if you keep a Windows backup set (backup of System State data, system partitions, and boot partitions ) or a full computer backup set (a backup of System State data and most of the data on your hard disks) of your servers prior to installing the updates. You can also back out of some of these updates if you have images of your server's boot and system partitions taken prior to installing the updates.
Keeping your software and firmware updates available saves a great deal of time when recovering from a disaster. For example, each update that is not stored on a disk at your location requires time to locate and download. This process can be very time consuming, especially if you need to download the updates over a slow Internet connection. One strategy for keeping your software and firmware updates available is to archive the updates by copying them to a network share in a folder with the same name as the computer where the updates are installed. If you archive these software and firmware updates, you can reinstall the operating system following a disaster, and then go directly to the folder on the network where you copied the updates and reapply the software and firmware updates. Having these updates stored in a network folder also gives you a central location for recording general information about the server, such as its disaster history, configuration information, and hard disk structure, and data about your cluster servers.
Another strategy for keeping your software and firmware updates available is to archive the updates to CD-ROM so each server has its own CD-ROM of all the updates applied to it (be sure to leave the session open for multiple burns as you add new updates to the server).
The information in this article applies to:
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