[BadVista Advocate] Portland Project Linux

[Don Hensley]

Yes that's the reliability part - real uptime.

But for those of us that actually work (or in my case worked) in the field, 
there are simply many, way to many to list, reasons for having to reboot a 
GNU/Linux box.

Here's at least 3 or 4 examples on just this one page (I picked this page 
because it was handy for me, I'll bet you could Google many more such pages):
 
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-5-manual/Deployment_Guide-en-US/sec-sel-admincontrol.html 

And there are literally hundreds, probably thousands, of other perfectly valid 
reasons to reboot a GNU/Linux box. 

Quite a lot of them have to do with the state of proc which very often 
requires a full reboot to reflect the change in state of one thing or 
another. 

BTW, this is a real problem to get through to people at times, because the box 
is running just fine - and may continue to run just fine... but one or more 
changes may not be reflected in that running state until after a full reboot. 
This may leave the box unstable, or at risk to some attack vector.

Now Crashes that require a reboot are much more rare, but I've seen thousands 
of kernel panic conditions that were not fully recoverable from, without a 
reboot.

BUT: You will never see a "Blue Screen of Death" on a GNU/Linux box (except as 
a joke screen saver or as funny wallpaper). 

Don.
 ******************************
 On Tuesday 01 May 2007 07:29 am, Michael D. Stemle, Jr. wrote:
On Tuesday 01 May 2007 05:50:09 Don Hensley wrote:
> Actually there are many conditions that will require a full reboot of any
> GNU/Linux computer.
>
> Most changes (especially those that go well) do not require reboots, this
> much is true.
>
> Where the legendary reliability of GNU/Linux comes into play is in the fact
> that they can have astounding up time, unlike most Windows systems.
>
> But anyone with any real hands on experience with operating systems will
> tell you that troubles can and do occur. And if it's bad enough it will
> require a reboot - no matter what the operating system is.
>
> But it will happen much, much, much, less often with GNU/Linux.
>
> Don.
>  *****************************
>  On Tuesday 01 May 2007 03:17 am, Sunnz wrote:
> Of course, you don't really need to reboot just because you changed
> "something". Unless it is the kernel.

The only time I ever reboot my wife's machine is when I upgrade to a new
version of Kubuntu or we go out of town and I think I can save some dough on
the power bill.

-- 
GNU/Linux is the future.
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