19 Apr
2010
19 Apr
'10
9 a.m.
Hi,
Your reply is, of course, reasoned and sensible. :-) Whilst multi-year
uptimes were not unheard of, they certainly weren't the "norm" either.
I was just attacking the assertion that "reboot" was something that
should be expect or even engaged in lightly.
There sees to be a move towards "change and patch" for the sake of it as
opposed to "run what you need, keep it secure with multiple layers of
defense and be wary of making any changes at all when something is working".
It saddens me when I hear people ruing each other with chants of "oooo,
legacy" as it almost always shows a misunderstanding of the other
party's reasoning or a complete misunderstanding of the actual business
requirements of a system rather than just the fact the software or
hardware is more than 2 weeks old.
These days system stability seems to be actively discouraged in a flurry
of changes and tweaks. Worse, often these changes are couched in terms
of those factors but without any clear indication that there is a
problem or the problem is big enough to warrant the disruption caused by
the "fix".
My friend's company once "lost" a server. They could ping it but no one
could remember where it was. Eventually they discovered that it had been
plastered up behind a partition during an office refurbishment a few
years previously.
Regards,
@ndy
--
andyjpb(a)ashurst.eu.org
http://www.ashurst.eu.org/
0x7EBA75FF
What? Oh how
things have changed. Time was you'd expect to go three or four years between reboots.
Perhaps on systems in completely controlled / closed networks that might have been true,
but in the 18 years I've been administering systems on the internet there have always
been times when it's been occasionally necessary to reboot in order to apply security-
or stability-related bugfixes. And that's not even taking into account downtime due
to failures or maintenance with facilities. (Server hosting facilities didn't used
to be as robust as they are now.)
I don't mean to start an argument, but I'm always suspicious of assertions that
things in the past were better than they really are. :) Progress is real.