[CentOS] how long to reboot server ?

Thu Sep 2 20:49:57 UTC 2010
Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at SoftDux.com>


On 2010/09/02 10:39 PM, Stephen Harris wrote:
> 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!
>
We do shared webhosting mainly so only really use Apache, Exim, MySQL, 
PostGreSQL, etc. So I guess it's not as "enterprise" as your situation 
but with hundreds of thousands of files on every server, being updated 
on a regular basis I do think that our servers fall in the same 
category. But then again we only use STABLE release software where 
possible. And I honestly haven't come across an issue where an rc script 
doesn't work properly after reboot. I've had cased where a kernel didn't 
work as expected though, but we don't reboot a server every 2 months to 
see if the kernel might have failed.

-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers, SoftDux MD

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