long term support release

[seth vidal]

On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 16:42 -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Jan 28, 2008 4:38 PM, Krzysztof Halasa <khc at pm.waw.pl> wrote:
> > "Stephen John Smoogen" <smooge at gmail.com> writes:
> >
> > > theoretically one could update a kernel without technically
> > > rebooting... but at what point are you just being silly to just say
> > > you have the longest uptime (and is it uptime if you have dropped all
> > > your services to do your update?)
> >
> > Think remote access, reboot is a dangerous operation. Anyway, if a
> > reboot buys you nothing you don't reboot, do you? :-)
> >
> 
> I reboot religiously. What does 5110 days of uptime buy me anyway? Not
> even a  cup of coffee.
> 

At my last job we put a policy in place where no system would have a
greater than 150 day update, unless it had extenuating circumstances.
What I discovered in general was this:

- systems that haven't been rebooted in a while sometimes gather cruft
that has not been properly laced into the startup. so it doesn't come up
on its own. Rebooting frequently ensures that people remember to do that

- any system that "MUST BE UP ALL THE TIME" should be redundant. If it
is not redundant and it is that important then that service is a pretty
precarious position.

- reboots ferret out problems in hardware that you don't always see
until a powercycle. Like a disk that will just keep on spinning provided
it is never stopped.


I agree with religiously rebooting boxes.

-sv