long term support release

Andrew Farris lordmorgul at gmail.com
Tue Jan 29 04:35:53 UTC 2008


Randy Wyatt wrote:
> There is a serious lack of understanding where Linux is, and where
> most want it to be in this thread.  A presumptive reboot does not
> actually provide any benefit whatsoever, and in fact often exacerbates
> situations.

That is a pretty broad brush to stroke with.

>   By the way,  all processes and modifications to systems in the field
> I work, are heavily documented.  The first time I saw a 3B2-80, I
> thought to myself what in the hell was that!,  but using known
> procedures, I was able to recover what needed to be recovered.

That is a scenario so deep into the 'it works fine leave it alone' region its 
comical.  A machine running with no changes being made does not need rebooted 
because the reboot might just break what works; I don't really think that is 
what Seth was getting at.

On the *far* other hand, a machine updating 10-20 packages a day (tracking 
rawhide for instance) does need rebooted regularly, otherwise what you're 
testing/operating is not the current state of development, but instead you're 
testing the result of an upgrade path across unstable packages you practically 
cannot duplicate (and never would want to).  A whole different situation.

Average Joe user does need somewhat regular reboots even if he really could keep 
the system alive without them, because 1) his changes being made are not well 
documented, 2) the changes from updates tend to be fairly frequent, and 3) there 
is much less care taken in making sure the updates completely take effect every 
time than on a high availability redundant service a team of engineers are 
managing.  It would seem foolhardy for a guy running a small business office 
server not to at least verify his hardware is solid via power cycles at some 
regular interval (naturally backing up the data first which he does regularly). 
  He certainly does not need to update for every single little thing like some 
systems may require.

So the 'it works - leave it alone for two decades' and 'general use of linux for 
random purposes' are pretty dissimilar situations.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> www.lordmorgul.net
  gpg 0xC99B1DF3 fingerprint CDEC 6FAD BA27 40DF 707E A2E0 F0F6 E622 C99B 1DF3
No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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