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

[Michael Loftis]

--On September 14, 2005 10:34:29 AM -0600 Colin Anderson 
<ColinA at landmarkmasterbuilder.com> wrote:

> Disclaimer: Not a troll
>
> I'm curious as to this obsession with uptime is. All of the posts of this
> type are along the lines of "After X days, Y thing does not work but if I
> reload or reboot, it's OK" - so why not cron a reboot? Is it considered
> bad form or something like that? I reboot every night whether it is
> needed or not, not afraid to admit it, and everything works fine for me.
>

You obviously come from a land of Windows.  I have machines that are up for 
years at a time internally, and externally months, depending on how often 
security patches or other critical upgrades need applying.  That's how 
computers should run.  MS is the crap that gets people into this damned bad 
habit of oh i rebooted and it's fixed.  No it's NOT fixed, you just got rid 
of the symptoms, the BUG is still there.

For most UNIX and derivitaves/workalikes reboots are unnecessary.  Only if 
something is broken, or seriously wedged.

> We also do the "Sunday reboot" of all of our Windows servers as well as
> restarting all of the critical services such as IIS , SQL, Exchange etc
> nightly. It helps, a lot (Exchange is a notorious memory leaker)

Yup, MS you need to because MS is broken.

> I've also heard it said, something along the lines of: "If you have to
> reboot, your server isn't set up correctly" to which I say piffle. Even
> NASA has rebooted the Mars probes after they land and I understand that
> they run VXWorks, incidentally, the same RTOS that my Mitel 3300 uses,
> and *even Mitel* recommends periodic reboots, which we duly cron every
> night, 2 AM.

Mitel isn't exactly known for telco grade operations.  And telco is usually 
the one that everyone quotes as being some of the most reliable systems in 
the world.  Imagine if Cisco or Juniper had this flawed mentality?  Or 
Fore?  Or IBM?  Or Acatel?  Or Nortel?  Yes I probably sound like a kook or 
a troll but so be it.

If a system is doing repeatable operations, and cleaning up correctly after 
itself, and doing periodic maintenance correctly, a reboot should never, 
under any circumstances be necessary.  Even restarting the services should 
be a rare item (hence one of my beefs with Apache mod_ssl).

> 24/7/365 installs aside, is there a reason why reboots seem to be frowned
> upon? Again, not trolling, just curious.