Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Why You Shouldn't Reboot Unix Servers

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the we-measure-uptime-in-years dept.

GMGruman writes "It's a persistent myth: reboot your Unix box when something goes wrong or to clean it out. Paul Venezia explains why you should almost never reboot a Unix server, unlike say Windows."

1 of 705 comments (clear)

  1. Uh.. no by Anrego · · Score: 5, Informative

    I for one believe in frequent-ish reboots.

    I agree it shouldn't be relied upon as a troubleshooting step (you need to know what broke, why, and why it won't happen again). That said, if you go years without rebooting a machine... there is a good chance that if you ever do (to replace hardware for instance) it won't come back up without issue. Verifying that the system still boots correctly is imo a good idea.

    Also, all that fancy high availability failover stuff... it's good to verify that it's still working as well.

    The "my servers been up 3 years" e-pene days are gone folks.