On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Ganesan Venkata Subramanian <[email protected]> wrote: > HI ALL > > IS THIS WHAT WE WANT ? > > http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2010/09/linux-machines-with-no-rebooting-is-this-what-we-want/ >
:-) Just entering the world of Mainframes for a few seconds "Four nines availability" and "Five nines availability" are terms unfortunately unfamiliar to PC users. Yet it is these figures - 99.99% and 99.999% availability - that are used to rate the reliability of mainframes. Such figures equate to between 5 and 53 minutes of downtime a year. In fact, for System/390 mainframes - the average time between failures that force a reboot and an initial program load - is 20 to 30 years. Such reliability is truly stunning from the perspective of a PC user, yet this kind of performance is crucial to businesses where a crash could incur losses of millions of dollars for every hour of downtime. " Comming back to our world of FOSS OSes;-) Today, as of now, when somebody brags about uptime of a server ( not a service ) he betrays an insecure server most of the time. Most OSes have security updates to the kernel which will force a reboot. So uptime is an indicator of how secure the OS on the Server is. Secondly ( even when there is not kernel update ) from an OS developer's perspective. " a libc fix would require rebuilding libc, plus relinking statically linked programs. Followed by a restart of all programs. That includes init(8), so you're probably better of just rebooting after all." http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=125035083804327&w=2 Some OSes don't support kernel modules in the name of security as you saw in the above thread. The arguments in that URL posted are also valid concerns. But again why I am not keen to have a *dontneedtoreboot-server* is because we have technologies that can be used to if we really want a 99.x uptime. Clustering, Loadbalancing, Replication, etc. There are challenges ofcourse :-) Even Firewall services can be run without down time ( or losing states ) when one of the firewalls in the cluster goes down for upgrade or reboot or hardware maintenence. http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#35 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Protocol http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html --Siju _______________________________________________ Indian Libre User Group Cochin Mailing List http://www.ilug-cochin.org/mailing-list/ http://mail.ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org #[email protected]
