[OpenIndiana-discuss] 3737 days of uptime

[David Brodbeck]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 1:16 AM, Ian Collins <ian at ianshome.com> wrote:

> Hands up all those who've bricked a Linux system or had a Solaris 10
> system that wouldn't play with live upgrade.
>

I've had a couple instances where Linux systems wouldn't boot after kernel
updates.  Generally these have been software, not hardware issues -- some
versions of the kernel changed how disks were identified.  It's enough that
I never apply kernel patches in a situation where it would be difficult to
travel to the site (unless I have good IPMI console support.)

I've had more issues where kernels caused performance or stability
regressions.  For a while regressions in NFSv4 stability were particularly
common; Linux clients talking to OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana servers were, and
continue to be, particularly problematic.  It eventually became problematic
enough that I scrapped NFSv4 and went to NFSv3, which also meant scrapping
ZFS in situations where I couldn't use an automount map.  I simply got
tired of rebooting hung clients and servers, and having to explain to my
users why the system was down yet again.

-- 
David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington