[CentOS] how long to reboot server ?

Thu Sep 2 20:39:29 UTC 2010
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 10:29:35PM +0200, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
> On 2010/09/02 07:39 PM, Stephen Harris wrote:
> >Indeed.  At my place we reboot production machines every 90 days.  Or
> >are meant to; I don't think management have worked out that rebooting
> >10,000 machines every 90 days means a lot of reboot activity!!
> >
> >(The idea being to verify that services will come up after some form
> >of DC-wide outage; last think we want in a "business contingency" situation
> >is a few hundred servers not working properly 'cos the rc scripts are
> >broken)
> 
> Interesting..... This generally won't happen on a rock solid OS like 
> CentOS, unless someone really screwed up badly or it's a super-custom 
> build which can't be updated using normal CentOS repositories.
> 
> We don't reboot servers (CentOS at least), unless we really really need 
> to. For minor kernel updates that doesn't give much more than what we 
> need we don't reboot either. Only for more critical / major / highly  
> important kernel updates, or hardware upgrades do we reboot.

You never upgrade the application?  The database?  Make config changes?
Wow... to live in such a static world :-)

Most of our problems aren't OS related, they're app or config
related... "change shared memory parameters for oracle", "start this at
boot time", "add new network interface"...  these all may prevent the
server from booting cleanly and aren't the OS's fault.  You don't want to
find that out during a crisis scenario!

-- 

rgds
Stephen