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@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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