Comments on: Why uptime is bad

By: Luke Hollins

Luke Hollins — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 14:22:57 +0000

Generally I would agree, but in some cases you can have a long running BSD or Linux box where by fluke none of the security advisories have warranted a reboot. This keeps happening to me on FreeBSD 4 boxes that are now soon to be replaced. In some cases a server may be doing a very specific task and just doesn’t need to be updated. While MySQL, Apache, PHP etc you don’t want to be running a four year old version missing out on great new features, there are cases where you may not need it or your odd application isn’t worth upgrading. If you’re really lucky you host a client’s server that has the long uptime because they won’t accept any propositions to update their software/sites.

By: gloomy

gloomy — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 07:23:20 +0000

And don’t forget the marketing stuff (-; Many people judge about the hosting quality by looking at the server uptime graph.

By: Eric Bergen

Eric Bergen — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:06:37 +0000

SuSE auto update seems to kick out a new kernel every month or so. Still an uptime of two years probably means you aren’t doing practice failovers.

By: gloomy

gloomy — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:03:04 +0000

Hi,

I think you should see a difference between machines/services that are going down too often for not being stable itself or for maintainence. How often do you need to upgrade a kernel on a stable freebsd/linux machine? I guess once in one-two years, not more often. Tools, services can be upgraded/updated without actually rebooting the machine. Updated machine with high uptime and load can show the experience of the system admin and quality of hardware.

By: Dean Swift

Dean Swift — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:35:26 +0000

I’m glad that others have this opinion. Although a server may be patched and updated, high uptime means outdated kernel.