wasadmin@optonline.net (WAS Admin) writes:
>My question is this: How often does your company reboot their Solaris
>servers?

We only reboot them when we need to. Patches sometimes call for
reboots. Stuff like that.

-Mike

WAS Admin wrote:
> My company uses a number of Solaris 8 servers. These servers are
> running Oracle, WebSphere, iPlanet, etc... They are scheduled to
> reboot every Sunday morning (no, I don't know why. Probably to cover
> up memory leaks).

WebSphere and memory leaks...., I've heard that before!

Thomas Glanzmann wrote:
> Hi Jorgen,
>
> * Jorgen Moquist <jorgen.moquist-nospam@mailbox.swipnet.se>:
>
>>we never reboot on schedule. weekly rebooting sounds like
>> the VMS era when the vax'es ran "faster" if the memory wasnt
>> so much fragmented or whatever the reason was ?.
>> it could have be a joke even then 20 years ago.
>
>
> that isn't a joke but a searious issue. There are several programs like
> ramdefrag[1] that address that issue. I'll soon package that programm
> for CSW so that no additional reboots will be necessary.
>
> Thomas
>
> [1] ramdefrag: RAM Defragmentation
> http://ramdefrag.sourceforge.net/
yes, you are right, ram increases, my comment was on
using scheduled reboots.(which i didn't agree with)
on an average server.
the vms (shceduled) rebooting issue is ofcourse true.
/Jörgen

WAS Admin wrote:
> My company uses a number of Solaris 8 servers. These servers are
> running Oracle, WebSphere, iPlanet, etc... They are scheduled to
> reboot every Sunday morning (no, I don't know why. Probably to cover
> up memory leaks).
>
> My question is this: How often does your company reboot their Solaris
> servers? Or are they only reboot if a problem occurs or for
> maintenance reasons? If your servers are reboot often, can you
> explain why?
>
> Thanks,
> Tequila
Our 4800 (12x900MHz, 12GB RAM, 5TB Disk), ran 6 months w/ avg. cpu usage
at 85%, and avg mem usage about 50%, before a powerfailure last night.
Mostly number crunching jobs.

~S

Shea Martin <smartin@arcis.com> writes:
>WAS Admin wrote:
>> My company uses a number of Solaris 8 servers. These servers are
>> running Oracle, WebSphere, iPlanet, etc... They are scheduled to
>> reboot every Sunday morning (no, I don't know why. Probably to cover
>> up memory leaks).
>>
>> My question is this: How often does your company reboot their Solaris
>> servers?

Never.



--
"The road to Paradise is through Intercourse."
[email me at huge [at] huge [dot] org [dot] uk]

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004 08:06:02 -0800, WAS Admin wrote:

> My company uses a number of Solaris 8 servers. These servers are
> running Oracle, WebSphere, iPlanet, etc... They are scheduled to
> reboot every Sunday morning (no, I don't know why. Probably to cover
> up memory leaks).
>
> My question is this: How often does your company reboot their Solaris
> servers? Or are they only reboot if a problem occurs or for
> maintenance reasons? If your servers are reboot often, can you
> explain why?

Outside of reboots associated with maintenance/patching, very rarely.

A lot of the apps we run are buggy as all hell, but
restarting the app server/DB instance normally is enough, rather than
rebooting the system.


Saundo
--
Chris "Saundo" Saunderson saundo@earthlink.net
Unix/CCNA/CCDA Guy Powered by Linux and the Orb.

"Chris 'Saundo' Saunderson" <saundo@earthlink.net> wrote in message
newsan.2004.02.29.17.53.02.97030@earthlink.net.. .
> On Thu, 26 Feb 2004 08:06:02 -0800, WAS Admin wrote:
>
> > My company uses a number of Solaris 8 servers. These servers are
> > running Oracle, WebSphere, iPlanet, etc... They are scheduled to
> > reboot every Sunday morning (no, I don't know why. Probably to cover
> > up memory leaks).
> >
> > My question is this: How often does your company reboot their Solaris
> > servers? Or are they only reboot if a problem occurs or for
> > maintenance reasons? If your servers are reboot often, can you
> > explain why?
>

Only for problems, maintenance. Most have been up for over a year.

The only reason to reboot should be

a) To clear out semaphores if you are not sure which database server is
using that
segment. (Tracking semaphores back to applications is impossible).

b) To upgrade/patch Solaris

c) To check if alternations to startup scripts work (Normally done with
b).

No other reasons should be needed. /etc/rc2.d/S?? to start and
/etc/rc2.d/S?? stop
to start/stop everything but Solaris!




> Outside of reboots associated with maintenance/patching, very rarely.
>
> A lot of the apps we run are buggy as all hell, but
> restarting the app server/DB instance normally is enough, rather than
> rebooting the system.
>
>
> Saundo
> --
> Chris "Saundo" Saunderson saundo@earthlink.net
> Unix/CCNA/CCDA Guy Powered by Linux and the Orb.
>

wasadmin@optonline.net (WAS Admin) writes in comp.unix.solaris:
|My question is this: How often does your company reboot their Solaris
|servers? Or are they only reboot if a problem occurs or for
|maintenance reasons? If your servers are reboot often, can you
|explain why?

Well, it's not at work, but a web server I've done some work on is
currently at:
11:20pm up 698 day(s), 19:54, 1 user, load average: 0.55, 0.39, 0.34

(Ultra 30, Solaris 8, virtually nothing running beyond sshd & httpd)

Unfortunately, nothing I know of at work is quite so impressive, due to
shutdowns from the entire building losing power for longer than the UPS
batteries last. (Of course, I don't work with the mission critical
servers in places where they have backup generators and the like, just
our little file and web servers for our engineering teams which don't
need such high availability measures.)

--
__________________________________________________ ______________________
Alan Coopersmith alanc@alum.calberkeley.org
http://www.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU/~alanc/ aka: Alan.Coopersmith@Sun.COM
Working for, but definitely not speaking for, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

wasadmin@optonline.net (WAS Admin) wrote in message news:<2b7019bb.0402260806.215950fd@posting.google. com>...
> My company uses a number of Solaris 8 servers. These servers are
> running Oracle, WebSphere, iPlanet, etc... They are scheduled to
> reboot every Sunday morning (no, I don't know why. Probably to cover
> up memory leaks).
>
> My question is this: How often does your company reboot their Solaris
> servers? Or are they only reboot if a problem occurs or for
> maintenance reasons? If your servers are reboot often, can you
> explain why?
>

I used to work on large/critical sites that don't have
a periodic reboots policy, and on as large and critical ones
that do.

My impression is that having a policy, in general,
shows a more serious attitude than not having one.
I'd even put it like "those who reboot, care more".

Let's face it: people prefere not to reboot because it's
an extra work, and noone likes it when his pager starts beeping at 5 a.m.
on Saturday morning because one of the servers failed to boot in time.
And, of course, managers don't dream to allocate the budget
for those exciting hours.

I's always easy to find an excuse for something you don't like
to do isn't it? "Reboots don't matter" is one of such excuses,
I believe.

To me, keeping the serves up until something happens,
sounds like a significant risk, and periodic reboots have
lots of good reasons besides cleaning up the memory leaks.
Checking for possible boot sequence screwups was already named here;
another one to consider is NFS or other nasty cross-mounts, or other
dead-lock-style interdependencies between the servers that sometimes
not only prevent them from booting, but even prevent from shutting down.
Organizing persistent backdoors and other hooks requires quite a bit
bigger effort from the hacker in the "dynamic" networks where the stuff
reboots every so often, thus security, IMHO, wins this way, too.
That's only what comes to mind easily.
Not necessarily the most important.

To summarise, reboots *do* help to discover the problems
at more convenient time, and to keep machines clean.
Reboot if you care :-)

Regards,
Andrei

aryzhov wrote:

>wasadmin@optonline.net (WAS Admin) wrote in message news:<2b7019bb.0402260806.215950fd@posting.google. com>...
>
>
>>My company uses a number of Solaris 8 servers. These servers are
>>running Oracle, WebSphere, iPlanet, etc... They are scheduled to
>>reboot every Sunday morning (no, I don't know why. Probably to cover
>>up memory leaks).
>>
>>My question is this: How often does your company reboot their Solaris
>>servers? Or are they only reboot if a problem occurs or for
>>maintenance reasons? If your servers are reboot often, can you
>>explain why?
>>
>>
>>
>
>I used to work on large/critical sites that don't have
>a periodic reboots policy, and on as large and critical ones
>that do.
>
>My impression is that having a policy, in general,
>shows a more serious attitude than not having one.
>I'd even put it like "those who reboot, care more".
>
>Let's face it: people prefere not to reboot because it's
>an extra work, and noone likes it when his pager starts beeping at 5 a.m.
>on Saturday morning because one of the servers failed to boot in time.
>And, of course, managers don't dream to allocate the budget
>for those exciting hours.
>
>I's always easy to find an excuse for something you don't like
>to do isn't it? "Reboots don't matter" is one of such excuses,
>I believe.
>
>To me, keeping the serves up until something happens,
>sounds like a significant risk, and periodic reboots have
>lots of good reasons besides cleaning up the memory leaks.
>Checking for possible boot sequence screwups was already named here;
>another one to consider is NFS or other nasty cross-mounts, or other
>dead-lock-style interdependencies between the servers that sometimes
>not only prevent them from booting, but even prevent from shutting down.
>Organizing persistent backdoors and other hooks requires quite a bit
>bigger effort from the hacker in the "dynamic" networks where the stuff
>reboots every so often, thus security, IMHO, wins this way, too.
>That's only what comes to mind easily.
>Not necessarily the most important.
>
>To summarise, reboots *do* help to discover the problems
>at more convenient time, and to keep machines clean.
>Reboot if you care :-)
>
>Regards,
>Andrei
>
>
There seems to be a certain amount of muddled logic here; considering some
of the points:
1) if you've changed the startup scripts, clearly they need testing and
debugging
by rebooting.
if you haven't, then there's no need to do so.

2) If you have OS memory leaks, report it to OS suppport; if you have
application
memory leaks, fix app. In interim, before fixes, then reboot; but
if, like many
of us apparently, the OS doesn't leak and neither do the apps, then
don't reboot
for this reason either.

3) If you find you have ``...interdependencies...'', which apparently
don't show
up for a long time, one could argue that it is good to keep going
till you hit
them so then you can identify and debug the problem.

4) Ground truth: those of us that run systems for long periods prove (to
ourselves at
least) that they function well in this regime; those of you who
reboot frequently
can only be theorizing.

As it happens, we have some simulation apps that run for several weeks
at a time;
weekly reboots are not an option.

Pete.