Duncan Findlay wrote:
On Sat, Nov 27, 2004 at 01:37:57PM -0500, David Brodbeck wrote:That's fine for individual services on distributions that use SYSV-style init scripts.
I reboot Linux servers when I need to upgrade the kernel, upgrade the BIOS, or have a startup script change that needs to be tested. Don't overlook that last one, it's less inconvenient to reboot right away and find out if it works than to find out it doesn't at 5 am after a power outage. ;)
Presumably you can test startup scripts without actually rebooting... rebooting to test a startup script seems so windows-ish.
On debian: /etc/init.d/foo stop /etc/init.d/foo start
should do it...
It doesn't help much with things that configure hardware, like network configuration scripts. It's hard to fully test those kinds of things without a reboot, since you can never be sure whether it's working because the scripts are right, or if it's working just because it was already working. The only way to really prove the machine can come up and get on the network on its own is to reboot it.
It also doesn't help with BSD-style init scripts, where you've got a few big monolithic scripts that do everything.
