Hey fellow sysadmins! I'm curious about your approaches to decommissioning a server. Do you have specific steps or processes you follow? Also, does your method differ if the server is physical versus virtual?
1 Answer
When it comes to decommissioning, our steps are pretty straightforward. We start with a final backup, remove the server from the domain, and then shut it down for about a week to make sure nothing critical is forgotten. After that, we remove it from DNS and then finally unplug it. It's pretty much the same process whether it's virtual or physical, but for physical servers, we'd usually spin up a new VM to restore any data just in case.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how we do it too! If there's anything running that we might have missed, we try to log connections for a bit before we decommission it so we can follow up.