On 1/4/06, Mike Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As an aside, if you don't reboot your system until you absolutely have > to, how do you know that when you -do- reboot it, there will be no > problems? Put another way, rebooting during a maintenance window > ensures that when you have an emergency reboot, the system will return > to a running state.
Good to "hear" your voice on the list Mike! And this last is a good point. Limoncelli and Hogan talk about the need for reboot testing in "The Practice of System and Network Administration." It's far better to solve a boot problem right after you've made the config change which caused it, than some time later after several other changes and a long power outage which exhausts the UPS. Limoncelli's anecdote about this goes back to the days when many places had a "one big computer." They used to re-boot their VAX/VMS machine at least three times during their monthly "standalone backup", first to demonstrate that the machine still could be rebooted, second after making any changes to the startup configuration which had been saved for the occasion, then how ever many were needed to debug the startup changes, then finally in order to accomplish the backup. Nowadays, when systems are distributed, rebooting one server has much less impact overall than it used to, and machines typically reboot much faster than the old mainframes/midi-computers did. Testing reboot regularly during maintenance helps keep your beeper from going off in the middle of the night because a machine fails to automatically reboot properly. So maybe I won't fall into the camp of priding uptime so much. -- Rick DeNatale Visit the Project Mercury Wiki Site http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/ -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
