On 9/4/10 12:42 AM, R-Elists wrote:
>
>>
>> we have CENTOS 5 on DELL servers. some servers have longer
>> than one year did not reboot. Our consultant suggest we need
>> at least reboot once every year to clean out memory junk.
>>
>> What is your opinion?
>>
>
> maybe i missed it yet, did anyone mention the old adage...
>
> "if it isn't broke, don't fix it?"
>
> that would seem to apply in many scenarios...
>
> certain exceptions noted of course, yet any good linux admin should be on
> very close to change logs etc anyways...
It's a safe assumption that all software is always broke. Read through the
changelogs of any large project if you want to see how depressingly true that is
or how unlikely it would be for something to be perfect. So the question
becomes one of whether you trust the people generating the updates to know
whether they are needed or not. With systems like fedora where the
distribution's goal is to push out new/different software in the hope of
eventually advancing the state of the art, you probably shouldn't expect updates
to be any more stable than what you have installed. But with RHEL/Centos where
the goal of the distribution is stability the updates generally are just to fix
things that need to be fixed. The only reasons to avoid them would be if you
have unusual circumstances like weird hardware or you think you know more about
linux than the team building and testing the updates.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com