server uptime

[Jerry Feldman]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:38:52 -0400
"Mark E. Mallett" <mem at mv.mv.com> wrote:

> sometimes it's good to reboot a system just to make sure you can.

That's very old school :-)
Back in the days where mainframes had the power of my PDA, operating
systems were somewhat unsophisticated. I ran a data center in San
Antonio where we ran VM/370 - IBM's virtualization, with the batch os
(OS/VS1) in one VM, and CMS for online users - data control and
programmers.  The thinking back then if we shutdown we may never get
the system back up, but this was 1950s mentality. But, memory leaks and
things could cause the OS to degrade over time. 

Today, for the most part, the Linux and Unix kernels really do not need
periodic reboots unless there is a problem. On out BLU mail server
we've seen that the routing table gets screwed up and is difficult to
fix. In any case, since nearly every service and driver can be stopped
and started remotely, the only reason I might want to reboot other than
a kernel upgrade is that it might be faster to reboot than to try to
fix an issue, but that tends to be more of a Microsoft mentality, but
Windows Server has become more stable also. 

-- 
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846
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