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PRODUCT REVIEW
Automate your server maintenance with GSX Server Guard
By Chris Miller
For this review, I decided to test a utility designed to make the Domino administrator's life easier in automating server maintenance. The product is GSX Server Guard (formerly GSX Reboot) made by, of course, GSX Groupware Solutions. You can find it at http://www.gsx.net.
The product is only designed for Windows NT 3.51 server or workstation with Service Pack 5 or later, Windows NT 4.x server or workstation with Service Pack 3 or later, and Windows 2000. I was disheartened to see that there were no visible plans for other platforms as well, but many will say that Windows is a great place to start for a Domino server maintenance tool. As for the resources necessary, documentation states that in standby mode, GSX Reboot uses from 0 to 2% of the CPU (Central Processing Unit) activity and requires 1.6MB RAM. I found this to be consistent on the test server. I installed on an older test server prone to crashes. It had 196MB RAM and a single 300Mhz CPU with a single Domino partition version 5.08.
I always read the promotional materials and help files first when doing a product review to compare not only the features to the actual product, but also to get a feel from the developer as to what the product is meant to do. GSX Server Guard is designed to boost server performance and reliability according to their materials from the Web site. It also has the ability to enable unattended server reboots with a password-protected Server ID. They note that restarting a Domino server with a password-protected ID is a Domino limitation. With the proper physical and network security, recoverable backups and disaster recovery plans, this isn't an area for concern.
The current version available for download was 4.02, and it has a 30-day evaluation with full product functionality, which was a nice treat. You may also obtain it via CD or email. It was available to run with Domino server versions 4.x and 5.x. Be sure to be aware of the status of all other Domino monitoring tools, as GSX has noted problems when trying to install GSX Server Guard with certain other tools. In other words, read the release notes.
Installation
Once downloaded, the installation itself was quite simple. Just make sure that all Domino tasks are stopped and Domino has been installed as a service previously. Domino clusters are supported, but partitioned servers are not supported. Also, if you have a server with different versions of Domino server installed, GSX Server Guard will use the first notes.ini that it finds from the system environment path on Windows, as shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
 
GSX Server Guard will use the first notes.ini that it finds. Roll over picture for a larger image.
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