Monday, November 14, 2005

Periodic Reboots

The sysadmins did maintenance on some common NFS filesystems this weekend. Before they rebooted my workstation they saw:

root@mybox> uptime
1:20am up 500 day(s), 13:23, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.01

If I had a dollar for every Windows PC that didn't have to be rebooted in 500 days, I'd have...nothing.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

not installed any kernel updates which require a reboot

Jeff Hunter said...

we typically install patches before reboots. I probably got patched to the latest last night. In my mind, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Anonymous said...

If Linux takes off as people seem to think, fequent reboots will be required there because it is more popular and therefore people will find more security holes.

A well managed windows server not accessible to the internet doesnt require many reboots at all (and i do mean managed properly)

Windows has an unfairly bad reputation, just for being popular

Jeff Hunter said...

I'm definitely biased, but just on my own computers at home I end up rebooting my Windows box every couple weeks. Hung applications don't behave well. IE is holier than swiss cheese. Viruses abound. The longest I've ever gone without Windows AutoUpdate telling me they have new patches is about a month. My Linux boxes stay up unless there is a problem with power and then they reboot. I've had my Windows box lose power enough times and not come up that I had to get a UPS for it. I don't trust it, I don't think it's stable. I won't use it for production. I won't use it for Oracle.

Anonymous said...

root@kbg-ora-01 /# uptime
6:49am up 605 day(s), 14:14, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 0.15, 0.15

Friday entire datacenter have to be shutdown due to shortcut in a powerswitch that needs to be replaced. No more good uptime for awhile

Anonymous said...

Well here the linux servers need rebooting a *lot* more than any windows server we have.

Put the machine under any sort of load and it freezes and reboots itself.

Its a shame that any server has to be rebooted just to keep it working