UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

This perhaps does not belong in ths category; apologies, however, we have a heated debate going and your input will decide the result.

Should UNIX (HP, AIX, etc) be rebooted following a monthly cycle (Every month, or a qtr, etc.). We have some UX admins (grumps) who say they have seen a UX server up for 5 years and etc. etc.

I have tried reading up on this topic but in the end I have decided to go to the people who do this for a living.

So what is a good practice?

Best of regards,

R

like ever... it depends...

i'm a friend of doin reboots on a regular basis to be sure all settings are saved in files and not only made temporarily. also if hardware has changed (which can be done online on some systems) i would recommend a reboot to be sure everything works as expected...

I'm with DukeNuke - periodic reboots have advantages, and show up problems. We take our boxes down over long (3 day) weekends, so it works out to several times per year.

However, we have 400+ blade servers running eithe Linux or Windoze - those are rebooted monthly.

If your grumps have left a box up for several years, taking it down has a higher probability of exposing problems, so in that case leave it alone. May be more trouble than you want. Older boxes are slower anyway - it may be possible that 4 years on a really old UNIX box is the same number of cpu cycles as you see on a new Linux dualcore PC in one month.

.. not so long ago, HP ran a contest to find the longest-running HP-unix box in the world. They found one in England which had been running since 1992 without a reboot.
.. wouldn't you love to unplug the power on that one

Anyway, I think it depends on what the server does and how's maintained. In the past, I've had servers running for 3-4 years non-stop, only stopped to be replaced with new ones, but these servers were doing 3 things, and 3 things only, with no updates and no regular users logging in and screwing them up. If you are not rebooting the server, you are not patching the kernel (or if you are, you are risking your kernel getting corrupted).

If you have a server which is constantly having stuff installed and uninstalled, or configs changed, yeah I would say a reboot schedule may be in order, but a turnkey system, not so much.

This has come up before.

in 2004 I am against
in 2008 I am in favor

Take your pick.

We patch all our systems twice a year, and those are the only times we reboot servers. Other than that, break/fixes are the only times the servers go down.

If we do overlook a server during a particular patch cycle, then we experience longer patching duration for the same server at our next patch cycle, and that's never fun

I thank you all for your time and reply. SInce the servers host an application to which about 20-25 people log in daily, etc. we have decided to re-boot at least once quarterly. The grumps have been out voted.

Thanks again.