[OpenIndiana-discuss] New Zone User Questions

[Sašo Kiselkov]

On 02/04/2013 08:02 PM, DormitionSkete at hotmail.com wrote:
> On Feb 4, 2013, at 11:45 AM, Sašo Kiselkov wrote:
> 
>> On 02/04/2013 07:31 PM, DormitionSkete at hotmail.com wrote:
>>> Oh, and a little off topic here, but some of you all didn't appreciate my old habit of weekly reboots just to clear out the RAM, etc. a while back.
>>
>> Please don't think that anybody here was dissing you or anything. It's
>> just that you had the wrong idea for why admins don't like to reboot
>> their machines very often. It's not because of some misguided dick
>> measuring contest, there are real issues with frequent rebooting.
>> Besides the obvious downtime, there are rippling network effects, such
>> as forcing reconvergence of distributed fault-tolerant systems, causing
>> long-term performance issues due to cold caches and plain old hardware
>> failure (on some systems hardware gets reinitialized and restarted at
>> reboot, which can considerably shorten its lifespan).
>>
>> If these don't affect you, then great, but most environments won't
>> tolerate service disruption without very good justification.
> 
> I knew I was taking a chance when I suggested it; but I thought it might
> buy the man some time to deal with it more at his convenience.

I understand the sentiment and I get your logic, but it has
unfortunately not worked in my instances (which is why I spoke up).
Suppressing problems is rarely an answer.

> I can't even fathom what you high-powered system admins do these days.

What do you mean?

> We really need somebody competent in the whole network and sys admin
> role(s) here...

Well, they can be had on the jobs market, but they do cost a bit. If you
are only setting up some low-volume services on only a handful of
servers, you may want to consider IT outsourcing and/or migrating to
cloud services where possible. Except for that LTSP thing you described,
e-mail and web services can be purchased at very reasonable prices.

Cheers,
--
Saso