Reasonable expectations of sysadmins

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Mike Brown <mike at skew.org> writes:
> Also, sometimes things go haywire after a reboot, especially after extended 
> uptime and updates to the kernel or core libraries, so I'm in the habit of 
> only shutting down when necessary. So if I don't see "and then reboot" in an 
> update procedure - and most of the time, security updates don't require it - 
> then I don't do it.

Actually, this is an argument in favor of rebooting regularly, or at
least after every major change, so you know the server will boot
unassisted if something happens (power outage, cleaning staff tripped
over the mains cable, etc.)  I once spent an entire evening coaxing a
mission-critical database server back up after a simple disk replacement
because a predecessor had performed an in-place system upgrade without
verifying that the new configuration would boot cleanly.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no