Reasonable expectations of sysadmins

[Lowell Gilbert]

Garance A Drosehn <gad at FreeBSD.org> writes:

> FWIW: If I have a production server which has been up and running for
> more than six months, I often reboot the machine *before* making some
> significant change, just to make sure the machine is still in working
> order before I make that change.  I then make the change, and reboot
> again.  There are times where I have discovered problems in that first
> reboot.

In theory, this should never be helpful.  

In theory, there's no difference between practice and theory.  
In practice, um...