Backing up and restoring a server's Chat Service configuration is essential to recovering from file corruption and hard disk failures. The first line of defense is regular Windows NT system file backups. Contact your Windows NT System Administrator to verify that your chat servers are backed up regularly.
To ensure a fast and complete recovery, store all configuration settings you make from the chatcmd utility in one or more response (.rsp) files. A response file is a text file of one or more chatcmd options that is run as a batch file.
Response files are useful for backing up a server's Chat Service configuration and for creating a network of chat servers. In this case, you set up one server and use customized versions of the same response file to set up the other servers. Each server's response file contains server-specific settings, such as the Server ID number, portal information, and so on.
You create a response file using any text editor, such as Notepad, and type each option on a separate line. If you use a word processor, be sure you save the file as plain text. You must update your response files every time you reconfigure the chat server.
The following example shows how to use a response file to set up portals between two chat servers.
To set up portals using a response file