19 Apr
2010
19 Apr
'10
9:43 a.m.
I don't usually jump in on these things, but this thread is starting to get
away from the point.
I've head that story before talking about Netware servers, sounds
"embelished" to me.
As a security paranoid sysadmin person who has run small Internet facing
Linux / BSD systems for years, including when working at an ISP some years
back, here is my two-penneth
1) FSCK - I don't do enough serious admin to run it manually - I wouldn't be
keen on it being removed from boot unless replaced with something else.
2) Messing with my server config without my knowledge - please don't -
that's not why I pay for a VPS for - otherwise I'd just get hosting.
3) Uptime - On a server with 2 or 3 visible services - I see no reason why a
year + uptime is not realistic. Most updates to Sendmail, Mailman, Apache,
PHP etc can be achieved without a reboot
4) My biggest gripe with Bitfolk is the number of crashes / reboots etc -
FAR more than my previous VPS provider
Even when I ran an old Pentium box co-located at a friends company it was up
for over a year, and that was on standard desktop hardware.
Seldom do systems at this sort of scale desperately need a kernel update in
my experience - we're not plugging in weird hardward devices that need
support, all drivers are pretty much static. There was a serious kernel
priv-esc a year or so back, but that was about it in my experience. If
something is working, stable and sufficiently secure, what good sysadmin
would mess about with it on the off chance of making it slightly better.
Stuart
On 19 April 2010 10:19, Alex Hudson <home(a)alexhudson.com> wrote:
On 19/04/10 10:00, Andy Bennett wrote:
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.
Surely this is an anecdote which would make any good sysadmin recoil in
horror?!
Imagine running important services on such a server and it blowing a power
supply. I wouldn't want to be the person to explain to the MD of the company
that not only was an important service not running, that I couldn't even
locate the machine it was supposed to be running on. Inept doesn't even
begin to describe it.
(It sounds apocryphal to me anyway, but it would certainly be a good
example of 'worst IT practice' I could think of)
Cheers
Alex.
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