Uptime complacency?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13360383

by boznz • 10 years ago

8 3 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have a fan-less BSD 10.2 Server running MySQL 5.6 I put in for a factory system and which has now been up for just over 300 days since it was built.

It is running along nicely and nobody is complaining but I am starting to get worried I should be doing some preventative maintenance other than the usual resource utilisation and backup checks or even just do a restart just for the hell of it! (Note I am not a *nix guy but the BSD/ZFS system came highly recommended and the build instructions seemed full proof but 300 days seems a lot for a windows guy)

I wont go into specifics but in general what are good things to look out for or check for me and other people in a situation such as this where you could get very complacent?

abrookewood• 10 years ago

Many, many years ago I had a Red Hat server running Bind. First the fan in the machine died. Then the video card died. Then finally all of the LEDs stopped working (including those in the NIC). The only way you could tell if the machine was on or not was to issue a DNS query against it ... which it happily kept answering without ever stopping.

As long as you are doing all of the usual maintenance tasks (patching, checking logs, monitoring resources etc), there isn't any real need to reboot a *nix/BSD server - certainly not just because you are nervous!

gumby• 10 years ago

Until I had to move from one colo facility to another from the same company (due to decommissioning the old facility) I had servers that had been up for more than a decade. They only ran specific services on two or three ports each (one service was ssh) so I wasn't too worried about them being compromised. I hadn't even visited the colo in years, though I used those machines constantly.

AznHisoka• 10 years ago

Make sure your /etc/rc.local or any startup scripts are up to date, and don't contain weird stuff that may prevent the system from rebooting properly.

Uptime complacency?

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