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A "Never Reboot" Service For Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Ksplice, the company based on the MIT Ksplice project, is now offering its 'never reboot' service for Red Hat, Debian, and other Linux distros. You subscribe and get real-time kernel security updates that apply in-memory instead of rebooting. Last summer we discussed the free service for Ubuntu. Cool tech, but will people really pay $4 a month for this?"
How long till they get sued by Microsoft?
http://www.google.com/patents?id=cVyWAAAAEBAJ&dq=hotpatching
An interesting illustration of theory (how it should be) vs. practice (how it pans out).
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Stating the obvious, yes, they are.
But third-party companies are under no obligation to offer their products and/or services for free, and this is a service of a third-party company (Ksplice).
If there is a demand for this service, plus an unwillingness to pay Ksplice for it, it's entirely possible (and likely) that someone will come along and offer an open source equivalent. But until the itch is scratched, Ksplice is perfectly within the right to offer the service at a cost.
I do tech support at a school. The moment that something goes offline (like our mail server), we start getting calls telling us that things are messed up.
Before anyone asks: Yes, we try our best to only reboot after-hours, and yes, we tell everyone when a service will be down.
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Color me stupid but wouldn't any application in which you'd rather not be rebooting (i.e. Router, firewall, file server, etc...) be the exact same application in which you'd NEVER want some 3rd party having access to your kernel? I mean, if a large percent of distros were using this I can just imagine it would be the A#1 target for every malicious coder in the world.
Designing your own operating system isn't exactly a small feat.. Linux already has very good penetration into the server market, and offers the security that most organizations should have. Linux is what Windows should be. There's a LOT you can do with that kernel.
Obviously complexity makes security difficult, but there's nothing wrong with making something complex if you're actually capable of managing it. Is setting up a rock solid firewall difficult for the average person in IT? Should we just get rid of anything in security that is relatively complex? I'd much rather have more options (not necessarily obfuscation) than be pigeon holed into something just because it's simple. Security is not simple, and it never will be.
"Cool tech, but will people really pay $4 a month for this?"
Depends. If it's your laptop, I suspect the answer is no. If it's your server farm, I suspect the answer is yes.
As an aside: Novell used to run contests to see who had the server with the greatest uptime since its last boot. Best one I ever saw was the Netware server that ran so long that everyone forgot where it was and it was accidentally walled-up inside a closet. Wouldn't it be great if the Linux community could run this type of contest? :)
Regards;
but telling people to check their email when their mail server is offline probably doesn't work for them.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Why not just compile the kernel locally, like normal people do
Um. Someone else want to break the news, or should I just go ahead and tell him?
The occasional reboot, under controlled circumstances, is an excellent test of what will happen in an emergency situation. Mainly, it answers the question of whether the server and required services actually will all come back up by themselves.
More importantly, if your service architecture can't handle the scheduled outage of individual servers, then it is unquestionably broken.
If you are concerned with individual server uptimes having a bearing on anything except your e-penis, then You're Doing It Wrong.
Ok, I'll do it.
Dear Hurricane78,
please, do not be alarmed. You suffer from an interesting form of amnesia that makes you believe we are still living sometime in February 2010. You also thought that J Cameron's (not to be confused with the late 20th-century fictionfilmer J Cameron. This one is more like the factfilmer D Attenborough) documentary on our early days on Pandora was syfy. But that's ok.
The fact is, however, that these days, normal people run "stock" kernels provided by "distros". It works pretty well and we think Linux is almost "ready for the desktop" now. If only we could get multiple monitors to work....
While we're at it, I should also tell you that Ubuntu is no longer with us. They never really recovered from the unexpected Crappy Century bug after it's version numbers began to repeat in the early 2100s, turning almost all computers into a "Warty".
This may all come as a shock to you. But do not worry. The nature of your amnesia means that you will very soon - right about now in fact - have convinced yourself that this post was humorous in nature and not actually reflective of reality. Trust me, many wish they could live in your world. The end of the 20th/beginning of the 21st century was the highlight for the human race. In fact, many of us are currently working on a project - codename "Charging" - that would result in the creation of a VR set in this glorious era. Like "Second Life", only more immersive. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and figure out where we'll get the energy to power this VR from....