01-25-2007
My policy, and this is one man's opinion, is that a Unix box should be rebooted every 4 months or better. Too many times I have seen a Unix box up for 8 or 9 months that would not reboot cleanly because of a hardware problem or a startup script problem. The scheduled reboot exposes this stuff. Also, at my last job, we had a critical Sun system that had been up over a year, with /.reconfigure present. The admin who put it there apparently had left the company and the rest of us did not know what to expect. (the answer: path-to_inst file was corrupt...) When a lightning storm took out our UPS, we got to discover stuff like this for 600 servers.
Another issue is that patches usually require reboots and a box that is setting records for continuous uptime is pretty much guaranteed to be missing some patches. Still another is that complex clusters sometimes require special boot sequences and these can change as services are added to a cluster. Cross dependencies between clusters can further complicate this.
On the other hand, daily or weekly rebooting is silly. I could tolerate once a month but I would try to push for 60 days. So my range is roughly 60 - 120 days and I'm willing to accept 30 - 60. (But I did not make the policy and we kept the boxes up until we were forced to reboot.)
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CAL(1) User Commands CAL(1)
NAME
cal - display a calendar
SYNOPSIS
cal [options] [[[day] month] year]
DESCRIPTION
cal displays a simple calendar. If no arguments are specified, the current month is displayed.
OPTIONS
-1, --one
Display single month output. (This is the default.)
-3, --three
Display prev/current/next month output.
-s, --sunday
Display Sunday as the first day of the week.
-m, --monday
Display Monday as the first day of the week.
-j, --julian
Display Julian dates (days one-based, numbered from January 1).
-y, --year
Display a calendar for the current year.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit.
-h, --help
Display help screen and exit.
PARAMETERS
A single parameter specifies the year (1 - 9999) to be displayed; note the year must be fully specified: cal 89 will not display a calendar
for 1989.
Two parameters denote the month (1 - 12) and year.
Three parameters denote the day (1-31), month and year, and the day will be highlighted if the calendar is displayed on a terminal. If no
parameters are specified, the current month's calendar is displayed.
A year starts on Jan 1. The first day of the week is determined by the locale.
The Gregorian Reformation is assumed to have occurred in 1752 on the 3rd of September. By this time, most countries had recognized the ref-
ormation (although a few did not recognize it until the early 1900's). Ten days following that date were eliminated by the reformation, so
the calendar for that month is a bit unusual.
HISTORY
A cal command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.
AVAILABILITY
The cal command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
util-linux June 2011 CAL(1)