[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk 1.0.9 long term stability <--thread hijack, why not reboot?

[Paul]

Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:

>Hmm, I guess I won't be buying any Mitel equipment.  The MARS rovers were 
>designed to be totally shut down as a last measure to ensure everything is 
>starting up as they'd simulated on Earth and that there was no high-energy 
>radiation glitches due to space travel.
>
>  
>
They designed it to be shut down. I guess that means it doesn't  just 
roll over like a dead cow.

You wouldn't design a crane controller so that it releases the load on 
reboot and then tries to return the cable to the pre-reboot position. 
The same principle applies here. If it's mission-critical, you might 
have to spend more on the hardware. A good example would be crosspoint 
switch modules that don't change state when the system is rebooted. That 
would prevent calls from being dropped as long as you don't design your 
system software to explicity clear all those modules at startup.

I did hardware and software design for some devices that were usually 
placed in very remote areas(underwater, mountains, arctic are a few). We 
used a very low power clock device that would boot the cpu up. We did 
whatever needed to be done, set the clock registers for the next wakeup 
and shut down again. There were other ways to approach the problem, but 
this approach made coding easier, used less power and allowed us to get 
more functionality without increasing rom or ram size. If you only 
needed to take one simple measurement and store it to the ram, you could 
do a boot/run/shutoff every second and still achieve some additional 
battery runtime.