One of your most important responsibilities as a system administrator is ensuring that the processes on file server machines are running correctly. The BOS Server, which runs on every file server machine, relieves you of much of the responsibility by constantly monitoring the other AFS server processes on its machine. It can automatically restart processes that have failed, ordering the restarts to take interdependencies into account.

Because different file server machines run different combinations of processes, you must define which processes the BOS Server on each file server machine is to monitor (to learn how, see Controlling and Checking Process Status).

It is sometimes necessary to take direct control of server process status before performing routine maintenance or correcting problems that the BOS Server cannot correct (such as problems with database replication or mutual authentication). At those times, you control process status through the BOS Server by issuing bos commands.