Should I Reboot, and Why? (was Re: [RDD] No Play out on Cart Wall)

Thu Jun 4 18:24:11 UTC 2015

I also reboot for kernel updates!

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 11:57 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Cowboy" <curt at cwf1.com>
>
> > On Sunday 31 May 2015 03:49:10 pm Graham Wilman wrote:
>
> > > after getting the play out working on clienta terminal for the past
> > > 6 days
> > > the decision was taken today to get clientb terminal working which
> > > it now partially is
> > > unfortunately once all 3 terminals the server.clienta and clientb
> > > were rebooted I could
> > > not get play out to work on clienta again
> >
> > Re-booted why ?
> > I've often said that rebooting a *nix machine is usually a bad idea.
>
> And, again, a good to recap some of Good Sysadmin Practice:
>
> In the Windows world, it's often recommended that you reboot a machine that
> is acting -- as we say in support -- hincky.  That's because Windows is
> sufficiently complicated and fragile that things can get corrupt at
> runtime, and the simple fact you rebooted it can fix a problem.
>
> That's traditionally not been true in the *nix world; particularly on
> purpose-built single function servers, there simply isn't enough code
> running at once to allow for the sort of complicated, multiplicative
> complexity failures that you see in many Windows machines.
>
> But does that mean you should never reboot a Linux box, just because
> you usually don't *have* to, to fix your problem?
>
> No, it doesn't, and here's why:
>
> Some of the things you might change in your configuration can affect
> how things start *when* you boot up, and if you've adjusted one of them,
> the time to boot it and find out *is right now, when you've just made the
> change and it's fresh in your mind*, not 6 months from now at 3 in the
> morning, when you don't remember what you did.
>
> Well, I suppose you could look in your logbook.  Or check your ticketing
> system.  :-)
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
> --
> Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink
> jra at baylink.com
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