Ok so hes not just banned from this game, hes banned from any and all he bought from them but doesn't yet have installed at the moment.
He's banned from the forums.
Unfortunately, EA uses that forum account to verify ownership of purchases from their on-line store.
Presumably (although I could be wrong here) he'd be OK if he'd bought a physical disc or purchased the game through Steam or some other way.
I don't think this is a good situation. I think that your ability to use the games you purchased should be independent of your ability to post on the forums.
But the summary implies that your ability to play any and all EA titles is tied to your EA forum login. And this is not accurate.
The difference seems pretty insignificant in this case.
They're two different ways of preventing the guy from playing the game.
In this particular case, yes, the end result is that he's unable to play Dragon Age II. If he'd already installed it before posting his comments though, he'd be fine.
The implication in the summary is that getting banned on the forums will prevent you from playing a game you've already installed.
Seems unfair given that playing the game doesn't affect anyone else.
I'm really not sure why such a big deal is being made of the fact that this is a single player game. Even if it was multi-player, I'd think it unfair.
Leave it up to the players. If I'm being an asshat, they can kick me off the server or ban me or blacklist me or whatever.
I suppose it might make sense in an MMOG specifically...
This is a product he paid for being remotely disabled...
The product was not remotely disabled. The summary is misleading on that respect.
The game had not yet been installed. Part of the installation process is a check for an active EA account (to make sure you're authorized to use the installer, and haven't just pirated it). Since his account was banned, he could not use the installer.
On your first point - the effect of the ban was to prevent the user from installing (and hence playing) the game. It wasn't that they prevented the user from buying the game (which would have been stupid, but arguably less evil) but rather that money had changed hands and the user wasn't able to access the game due to the ban. Given the space limitations on story titles and summaries, this felt like a fair summing up to me.
Your summary implies that the game had already been installed and was working. This is not the case. There is a difference between banning somebody from a game, and preventing them from installing it in the first place.
Your summary implies that EA could, at any time, swoop in and prevent gamers from playing their games. This may actually be true. But that isn't what's happening here.
The actual situation is no different than if his Internet went out - he would be unable to use the installer, but still able to play anything already installed on his machine.
The problem with DRM'd ebooks is that the transaction is never over. You continuously have to ask permission to do things with your purchase. If you trust the company to continue to give this permission then it is not a problem. However I have a real problem doing this especially since, by using DRM, the company is explicitly saying that they do not trust you.
Which is why you buy DRM-free ebooks in formats like.epub and.pdf - and you can use them on whatever device you like and share them with anyone you like.
These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It's not an automatic sale,' says Locke. 'And the reason it's not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value.' Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5 years all digital books will cost 99 cents. 'I don't think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go,' writes Kelly. 'It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable.
This, I think, is the key.
Authors today can self-publish very easily. B&N offers a service to publish ebooks, as do plenty of other places. You don't need to go to a big publishing company to get your work out there.
So all that overhead - all the editors and agents and PR folks and whatever else - is gone. Sure, you're paying something to the folks creating your ebook... But it's usually a fraction of what a big ol' publishing company would take.
So you can price your books lower, and get a bigger chunk of the profits, and actually come out ahead.
And the traditional publishing companies are going to have to compete against that. Not just for customers... But for authors, as well.
Electronic publishing and distribution has the potential to shake up the world of literature at least as much as the printing press did.
Considering the limitations of Electronic Books; can't give them to friends or family to read
At least on the nook, you are able to lend books to other people. There are whole forums dedicated to lending ebooks.
And if it's a family member, you can just share a single B&N account and have full access to the library without even having to lend anything.
can't resell them
This! This is the single biggest problem with ebooks. I'd love to be able to re-sell some of my ebooks after I'm done with them.
can have them pulled without notice
Depends on the format and the delivery mechanism. If you've bought your book through Amazon with their Kindle, yeah, they can pull it off your device. But if you buy it in a standard format like.epub from one of the many ebook stores on-line, it's just a file sitting on a device, and nobody can delete it. Well, I guess they could do a complete remote wipe... But you could always throw a backup copy back on the device.
the price is way too high
Depends on what you're buying, and where.
Depending on the title, I don't mind paying $10 for an ebook. Yeah, part of me thinks that it ought to be cheaper because there's no paper involved... But you've still got the cost of the editors and agents and authors and whatnot... So it isn't like all that expense just disappears because there's no paper involved.
But I've also downloaded metric craptons of free ebooks from various sites. Usually they're public domain stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Poe and Lovecraft... But you'd still wind up paying cash for a paper copy, just because of the cost to actually put it on paper.
And then you've got authors like Peter Watts who are making brand new ebooks available for free.
And B&N has a free ebook every Friday. Lately they've been pretty crappy things not even worth the bandwidth it'd take to download them... But They've also had some decent stuff for free.
And even when I'm paying full price for an ebook, they aren't all priced at $10. B&N has a huge selection of ebooks for under $5 - which is cheaper than most paperbacks these days. And there are plenty of other websites out there that'll sell you ebooks for less than $10. Sometimes significantly less.
Even if you define a library as a culture and information repository, this library fails that test - because it's an internet access point, not a repository. A repository holds and conserves physical objects or digital data, this library does not.
I didn't read the fine article... But from the summary I was under the impression that the library consisted of more than a giant wireless access point. I thought it contained flat-screen TVs, video games, and a variety of e-readers.
And while it is true that these may all be provided on a bring-your-own-content basis... I had kind of assumed that the library would contain media to be used with those devices.
375+ watts. That's more than my whole computer. Oddly enough I have plenty of headroom in my power supply and it only requires a single slot so if I felt the need to punch myself in the nuts by loading drivers written by ATI onto my computer, I could slap it right in there.
Holy hell. I've only got a 500w PSU in my box... I don't think I could even run one of those.
It's about exactly twice as much as the budget I've set aside for building my next PC...
Last computers I built were budgeted at $500 a piece... Whole new systems - motherboard, CPU, RAM, HDD, power supply, LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, all of it. Came in just slightly over after I was done with shipping and handling and whatnot...
We're still using those computers, too. And we do a good amount of gaming. Obviously I can't crank all the settings up as far as they'll go... But I have yet to see a game that didn't play just fine on this machine.
Hey, if you've got the money to play, lucky you. I'm envious.
Yep.
I was always kind of amazed at these prices... I'd build an entire computer for $700, and then somebody would come along and tell me how they had two of these $700 video cards in their machine.
I mean... If you've got the money, go for it. But I just can't see justifying $1400 in video cards alone. Especially when we're talking about the consumer-grade gaming cards. Are a few more frames per second in Crysis really worth $1400 to you?
Honestly, games treat pretty much everything in a two-dimensional way. Every system is a dramatic simplification. Every mechanic is there to make the game fun. You don't see a whole hell of a lot of depth or complexity to any of it.
The only Areafor MS is business if they convince their corporate customer to switch off Blackberry. Goto any store and watch what interests people its the iPhone and the big screen Android phones. I suspect Ms is regretting doing the "tile" thing
I hated my BlackBerry. Cumbersome thing. I was downright happy to get rid of it and switch to an Android device.
Microsoft could really be in a good position to dethrone the BlackBerry.
If Microsoft can offer better enterprise management tools than BlackBerry... And if Nokia can offer shinier phones than BlackBerry... I think folks would switch without hesitation.
Adobe should have just stood their ground, and used THEIR bulk to break Apple, not the other way around.
Adobe isn't worried about their plugin. They want to sell authoring tools. They can sell tools that build HTML5 stuff just as easily as tools that build Flash stuff.
I dunno. It isn't my server. Maybe I mis-understood the OP...
I thought that his "In the meantime, watch and learn as I kill the offending processes" was a reference to those zombie processes that eat his server. I figured he had some method of cleaning them out, and was wondering why that method couldn't simply be automated.
But if that was a reference to something else entirely, and he's got no magic method for killing zombies, then I suppose it makes sense that you'd have to reboot.
Sometimes a one-off mistake happens, and reinstall makes sense. Many other times, the reason you had to reinstall is due to a more persistent problem (program/script systematically messing up or an admin that just needs to not be doing admin work), and skipping root cause analysis means you'll lose more time in the aggregate.
So you re-image and get that new VM into production. And then take the old, cranky VM into development and find the root cause with little to no downtime. And then you incorporate the fix for that root cause into a new image. And then you re-image and put the new and improved VM into production with little to no downtime.
It's funny how many admins out there can't even set permissions in *NIX. I was working with a guy who was very well-versed in the VM world. Several certs after his name, in fact. But when he had to actually set permissions on the.vmdk files on the ESX host from the command line, he was clueless. I explained to him the whole rwxX and how each numerical value changes the bit for that permission and it was a completely wasted effort.
I've been using *NIX systems of various kinds for over 10 years now... I don't have any certificates though, and I wouldn't really call myself anything more than a power user...
I know you can set all the permissions with one command by using the numeric code... Rather than having to go through several passes of u+rw, g-rx, whatever... And maybe I'm just a lousy sysadmin because I can't do the whole binary thing in my head... But it'll take me longer figure out the numeric code than it'll take me to type out the several passes of u/g/o/+/-/=/whatever.
As VM's are virtualized and taking snapshots of them becomes so easy, why would you bother troubleshooting anything when you can just restore to a snap that is an hour old? Better than the server being down and spending who knows how long trying to figure out what's wrong.
Hell... If you can get your data off of the machine itself and store it on a SAN or a separate database or something, you can just boot from a clean, read-only image every day. Makes it really easy to keep the system happy.
Sure it was cool, back in the day, to spend 72 hours working on "the server" because even rebooting was not an option. Back then I had 3 servers, 10 years later I had 15.
We've got about 30 servers to worry about, and this is a small hospital.
And downtime is basically never an option.
If I can rebuild a server and restore a data backup in 4 hours or I can spend an infinite amount of time "fixing" the existing install, which option do you think my PHB would prefer? It is not bad administration, it is just different.
Yup.
72 hours to dig out a problem on some machine that's being cranky? Yeah, that's not gonna happen. We'll restore a snapshot or provision a new VM and be back up and running within hours. Hell, even if we have to rebuild a physical box and restore from tape we can get it up and running in a day.
Logical solution (and the one recommended by sysadmins): upgrade application to version X, which is supposed to have a much better database management.
What do you think the PHB/management solution is? Ask the DBAs to write a script that will monitor zombie processes, so the sysadmins will be warned in advance... Like, around 20 minutes before the application crashes. Just enough time to tell all users to save their work, because we need to reboot everything. Just like under Windows.
The new version costs money. And, no matter how important everyone thinks this application is, they obviously don't think it's worth that price. They're willing to deal with a reboot rather than spend the money. I'd recommend the upgrade, too... But I don't write the checks. Nor do I really use the app. I just keep it running. And if you tell me you can live without the app for 10-15 minutes while the server reboots, and you'd rather save $X instead of buying the new version, that's what we're going to do.
Listen, I don't care how many times you do this on a Windows machine, but this is UNIX - I'll only reboot this machine if I absolutely need to. In the meantime, watch and learn as I kill the offending processes.
That's great when you can get away with it... But sometimes it just isn't worth the trouble. Even on a UNIX system.
Yeah, I hate rebooting to fix problems. Seems like a crude approach. Especially when you've got so many nice tools at your disposal on a UNIX system.
And, I guess, I'm kind of wondering why it needs to be rebooted in your situation. You've got a script monitoring zombie processes... And those processes can apparently be killed manually... So why not have that script kill the processes instead of just monitoring them? Or write a second script to fire off a batch of zombie kills?
But sometimes it just isn't worth the time/effort involved. You can spend a couple hours digging for the problem while your users are without their app... Spend a couple hours developing and testing your script while your users are without their app... Spend a few days patching code while your users are without their app... Or you can just reboot the thing and go on with your life.
Oh, and re-installing the machine means 24h of downtime
This seems wrong to me. Or, at least, completely unrelated to the subject of re-imaging in a virtualized environment.
It takes maybe 5 minutes to provision a new VM complete with OS and default config/apps/whatever.
If I had a system that was as essential as what you describe, I'd have a base image of it stored and ready to go. Just bring up the new image, migrate the data, and make it live. That's what we do with all of our truly essential systems. And we can be running off a new image within about 30 minutes if we're able to migrate data off the old system. If we have to go to tape it'll take longer.
If you actually incur 24 hours of downtime to re-image a server, what's your plan if that machine simply dies? What if it takes more than a simple re-image to get it back up and running?
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Ok so hes not just banned from this game, hes banned from any and all he bought from them but doesn't yet have installed at the moment.
He's banned from the forums.
Unfortunately, EA uses that forum account to verify ownership of purchases from their on-line store.
Presumably (although I could be wrong here) he'd be OK if he'd bought a physical disc or purchased the game through Steam or some other way.
I don't think this is a good situation. I think that your ability to use the games you purchased should be independent of your ability to post on the forums.
But the summary implies that your ability to play any and all EA titles is tied to your EA forum login. And this is not accurate.
The difference seems pretty insignificant in this case.
They're two different ways of preventing the guy from playing the game.
In this particular case, yes, the end result is that he's unable to play Dragon Age II. If he'd already installed it before posting his comments though, he'd be fine.
The implication in the summary is that getting banned on the forums will prevent you from playing a game you've already installed.
Seems unfair given that playing the game doesn't affect anyone else.
I'm really not sure why such a big deal is being made of the fact that this is a single player game. Even if it was multi-player, I'd think it unfair.
Leave it up to the players. If I'm being an asshat, they can kick me off the server or ban me or blacklist me or whatever.
I suppose it might make sense in an MMOG specifically...
This is a product he paid for being remotely disabled...
The product was not remotely disabled. The summary is misleading on that respect.
The game had not yet been installed. Part of the installation process is a check for an active EA account (to make sure you're authorized to use the installer, and haven't just pirated it). Since his account was banned, he could not use the installer.
On your first point - the effect of the ban was to prevent the user from installing (and hence playing) the game. It wasn't that they prevented the user from buying the game (which would have been stupid, but arguably less evil) but rather that money had changed hands and the user wasn't able to access the game due to the ban. Given the space limitations on story titles and summaries, this felt like a fair summing up to me.
Your summary implies that the game had already been installed and was working. This is not the case. There is a difference between banning somebody from a game, and preventing them from installing it in the first place.
Your summary implies that EA could, at any time, swoop in and prevent gamers from playing their games. This may actually be true. But that isn't what's happening here.
The actual situation is no different than if his Internet went out - he would be unable to use the installer, but still able to play anything already installed on his machine.
He bought the game from EA online store and because he was banned, the installer didn't work.
Thus effectively banning him from the game. Your point? Or do you wish to continue being a pedant?
If the game had already been installed, he could presumably continue playing.
So he was not banned from playing the single player game, he was prevented from installing it.
The problem with DRM'd ebooks is that the transaction is never over. You continuously have to ask permission to do things with your purchase. If you trust the company to continue to give this permission then it is not a problem. However I have a real problem doing this especially since, by using DRM, the company is explicitly saying that they do not trust you.
Which is why you buy DRM-free ebooks in formats like .epub and .pdf - and you can use them on whatever device you like and share them with anyone you like.
These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It's not an automatic sale,' says Locke. 'And the reason it's not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value.' Kevin Kelly predicts that within 5 years all digital books will cost 99 cents. 'I don't think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go,' writes Kelly. 'It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable.
This, I think, is the key.
Authors today can self-publish very easily. B&N offers a service to publish ebooks, as do plenty of other places. You don't need to go to a big publishing company to get your work out there.
So all that overhead - all the editors and agents and PR folks and whatever else - is gone. Sure, you're paying something to the folks creating your ebook... But it's usually a fraction of what a big ol' publishing company would take.
So you can price your books lower, and get a bigger chunk of the profits, and actually come out ahead.
And the traditional publishing companies are going to have to compete against that. Not just for customers... But for authors, as well.
Electronic publishing and distribution has the potential to shake up the world of literature at least as much as the printing press did.
Considering the limitations of Electronic Books; can't give them to friends or family to read
At least on the nook, you are able to lend books to other people. There are whole forums dedicated to lending ebooks.
And if it's a family member, you can just share a single B&N account and have full access to the library without even having to lend anything.
can't resell them
This! This is the single biggest problem with ebooks. I'd love to be able to re-sell some of my ebooks after I'm done with them.
can have them pulled without notice
Depends on the format and the delivery mechanism. If you've bought your book through Amazon with their Kindle, yeah, they can pull it off your device. But if you buy it in a standard format like .epub from one of the many ebook stores on-line, it's just a file sitting on a device, and nobody can delete it. Well, I guess they could do a complete remote wipe... But you could always throw a backup copy back on the device.
the price is way too high
Depends on what you're buying, and where.
Depending on the title, I don't mind paying $10 for an ebook. Yeah, part of me thinks that it ought to be cheaper because there's no paper involved... But you've still got the cost of the editors and agents and authors and whatnot... So it isn't like all that expense just disappears because there's no paper involved.
But I've also downloaded metric craptons of free ebooks from various sites. Usually they're public domain stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Poe and Lovecraft... But you'd still wind up paying cash for a paper copy, just because of the cost to actually put it on paper.
And then you've got authors like Peter Watts who are making brand new ebooks available for free.
And B&N has a free ebook every Friday. Lately they've been pretty crappy things not even worth the bandwidth it'd take to download them... But They've also had some decent stuff for free.
And even when I'm paying full price for an ebook, they aren't all priced at $10. B&N has a huge selection of ebooks for under $5 - which is cheaper than most paperbacks these days. And there are plenty of other websites out there that'll sell you ebooks for less than $10. Sometimes significantly less.
Even if you define a library as a culture and information repository, this library fails that test - because it's an internet access point, not a repository. A repository holds and conserves physical objects or digital data, this library does not.
I didn't read the fine article... But from the summary I was under the impression that the library consisted of more than a giant wireless access point. I thought it contained flat-screen TVs, video games, and a variety of e-readers.
And while it is true that these may all be provided on a bring-your-own-content basis... I had kind of assumed that the library would contain media to be used with those devices.
The question is, essentially, "what is a library?"
Is it purely a book repository?
Or is it more of a cultural or information repository?
Because a good chunk of our culture and information these days is never printed out in a book.
Honestly.... what games are even going to stress this card in the foreseeable future?
The obvious joke is Crysis 2...
But, seriously, something like this is pure overkill.
I've got a two-year-old video card that I bought for $150 at the time, and it still plays everything just fine.
My $150 card I bought a year ago can play every game on the market right now. Why do I need a $700 card?
Hell, the $150 card I bought about two years ago still works fine.
Obviously I can't crank all the settings up as high as they'll go... But I have yet to run into a game that doesn't run well.
Just finished playing through Dead Space 2 - it ran fine and looked great.
375+ watts. That's more than my whole computer. Oddly enough I have plenty of headroom in my power supply and it only requires a single slot so if I felt the need to punch myself in the nuts by loading drivers written by ATI onto my computer, I could slap it right in there.
Holy hell. I've only got a 500w PSU in my box... I don't think I could even run one of those.
It's about exactly twice as much as the budget I've set aside for building my next PC...
Last computers I built were budgeted at $500 a piece... Whole new systems - motherboard, CPU, RAM, HDD, power supply, LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, all of it. Came in just slightly over after I was done with shipping and handling and whatnot...
We're still using those computers, too. And we do a good amount of gaming. Obviously I can't crank all the settings up as far as they'll go... But I have yet to see a game that didn't play just fine on this machine.
and your wallet too!
$700. ouch.
Hey, if you've got the money to play, lucky you. I'm envious.
Yep.
I was always kind of amazed at these prices... I'd build an entire computer for $700, and then somebody would come along and tell me how they had two of these $700 video cards in their machine.
I mean... If you've got the money, go for it. But I just can't see justifying $1400 in video cards alone. Especially when we're talking about the consumer-grade gaming cards. Are a few more frames per second in Crysis really worth $1400 to you?
Honestly, games treat pretty much everything in a two-dimensional way. Every system is a dramatic simplification. Every mechanic is there to make the game fun. You don't see a whole hell of a lot of depth or complexity to any of it.
The only Areafor MS is business if they convince their corporate customer to switch off Blackberry. Goto any store and watch what interests people its the iPhone and the big screen Android phones. I suspect Ms is regretting doing the "tile" thing
I hated my BlackBerry. Cumbersome thing. I was downright happy to get rid of it and switch to an Android device.
Microsoft could really be in a good position to dethrone the BlackBerry.
If Microsoft can offer better enterprise management tools than BlackBerry... And if Nokia can offer shinier phones than BlackBerry... I think folks would switch without hesitation.
Adobe should have just stood their ground, and used THEIR bulk to break Apple, not the other way around.
Adobe isn't worried about their plugin. They want to sell authoring tools. They can sell tools that build HTML5 stuff just as easily as tools that build Flash stuff.
The key being going back to figure out the problem. Not just "forgetting" about it and moving on.
Assuming, of course, that you can do this and don't wind up being shoved on to some other project because this one is "fixed".
How would you get rid of the zombies?
I dunno. It isn't my server. Maybe I mis-understood the OP...
I thought that his "In the meantime, watch and learn as I kill the offending processes" was a reference to those zombie processes that eat his server. I figured he had some method of cleaning them out, and was wondering why that method couldn't simply be automated.
But if that was a reference to something else entirely, and he's got no magic method for killing zombies, then I suppose it makes sense that you'd have to reboot.
Sometimes a one-off mistake happens, and reinstall makes sense. Many other times, the reason you had to reinstall is due to a more persistent problem (program/script systematically messing up or an admin that just needs to not be doing admin work), and skipping root cause analysis means you'll lose more time in the aggregate.
So you re-image and get that new VM into production. And then take the old, cranky VM into development and find the root cause with little to no downtime. And then you incorporate the fix for that root cause into a new image. And then you re-image and put the new and improved VM into production with little to no downtime.
It's funny how many admins out there can't even set permissions in *NIX. I was working with a guy who was very well-versed in the VM world. Several certs after his name, in fact. But when he had to actually set permissions on the .vmdk files on the ESX host from the command line, he was clueless. I explained to him the whole rwxX and how each numerical value changes the bit for that permission and it was a completely wasted effort.
I've been using *NIX systems of various kinds for over 10 years now... I don't have any certificates though, and I wouldn't really call myself anything more than a power user...
I know you can set all the permissions with one command by using the numeric code... Rather than having to go through several passes of u+rw, g-rx, whatever... And maybe I'm just a lousy sysadmin because I can't do the whole binary thing in my head... But it'll take me longer figure out the numeric code than it'll take me to type out the several passes of u/g/o/+/-/=/whatever.
As VM's are virtualized and taking snapshots of them becomes so easy, why would you bother troubleshooting anything when you can just restore to a snap that is an hour old? Better than the server being down and spending who knows how long trying to figure out what's wrong.
Hell... If you can get your data off of the machine itself and store it on a SAN or a separate database or something, you can just boot from a clean, read-only image every day. Makes it really easy to keep the system happy.
Sure it was cool, back in the day, to spend 72 hours working on "the server" because even rebooting was not an option. Back then I had 3 servers, 10 years later I had 15.
We've got about 30 servers to worry about, and this is a small hospital.
And downtime is basically never an option.
If I can rebuild a server and restore a data backup in 4 hours or I can spend an infinite amount of time "fixing" the existing install, which option do you think my PHB would prefer? It is not bad administration, it is just different.
Yup.
72 hours to dig out a problem on some machine that's being cranky? Yeah, that's not gonna happen. We'll restore a snapshot or provision a new VM and be back up and running within hours. Hell, even if we have to rebuild a physical box and restore from tape we can get it up and running in a day.
Logical solution (and the one recommended by sysadmins): upgrade application to version X, which is supposed to have a much better database management.
What do you think the PHB/management solution is? Ask the DBAs to write a script that will monitor zombie processes, so the sysadmins will be warned in advance... Like, around 20 minutes before the application crashes. Just enough time to tell all users to save their work, because we need to reboot everything. Just like under Windows.
The new version costs money. And, no matter how important everyone thinks this application is, they obviously don't think it's worth that price. They're willing to deal with a reboot rather than spend the money. I'd recommend the upgrade, too... But I don't write the checks. Nor do I really use the app. I just keep it running. And if you tell me you can live without the app for 10-15 minutes while the server reboots, and you'd rather save $X instead of buying the new version, that's what we're going to do.
Listen, I don't care how many times you do this on a Windows machine, but this is UNIX - I'll only reboot this machine if I absolutely need to. In the meantime, watch and learn as I kill the offending processes.
That's great when you can get away with it... But sometimes it just isn't worth the trouble. Even on a UNIX system.
Yeah, I hate rebooting to fix problems. Seems like a crude approach. Especially when you've got so many nice tools at your disposal on a UNIX system.
And, I guess, I'm kind of wondering why it needs to be rebooted in your situation. You've got a script monitoring zombie processes... And those processes can apparently be killed manually... So why not have that script kill the processes instead of just monitoring them? Or write a second script to fire off a batch of zombie kills?
But sometimes it just isn't worth the time/effort involved. You can spend a couple hours digging for the problem while your users are without their app... Spend a couple hours developing and testing your script while your users are without their app... Spend a few days patching code while your users are without their app... Or you can just reboot the thing and go on with your life.
Oh, and re-installing the machine means 24h of downtime
This seems wrong to me. Or, at least, completely unrelated to the subject of re-imaging in a virtualized environment.
It takes maybe 5 minutes to provision a new VM complete with OS and default config/apps/whatever.
If I had a system that was as essential as what you describe, I'd have a base image of it stored and ready to go. Just bring up the new image, migrate the data, and make it live. That's what we do with all of our truly essential systems. And we can be running off a new image within about 30 minutes if we're able to migrate data off the old system. If we have to go to tape it'll take longer.
If you actually incur 24 hours of downtime to re-image a server, what's your plan if that machine simply dies? What if it takes more than a simple re-image to get it back up and running?