[Techtalk] rebooting bad?

hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk
Tue Aug 20 16:25:38 EST 2002


On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 10:51:15AM -0400 or thereabouts, Malcolm-Rannirl wrote:
> Now, I was right about the not needing to reboot (all it actually took was 
> for the main application to be not running for five minutes, which was not a 
> problem as at 4am no one would be using the machine). However, I couldn't 
> explain why rebooting was inherently bad (as opposed to merely unnecessary).
> So, is it, and if so why? Or was this just a "linux is not NT" reaction?

I have been told that with very ancient disc drives which have 
been chuntering along for a long time, spinning them down and up 
is the point they're most likely finally to die. When we moved 
house, we were quite worried about this. It wasn't the loss of 
years of uptime that worried us. That's just stuff to be silly
about. It was the possibility the drives might not start back up.

Given that I leave my boxes up for long periods of time, it's
odds-on that at some stage I will change something like network
settings or services I want to run and forget to ensure that
they're in /etc/whatever. So when it reboots, I tend to think
that's when they're likely not to start up again.

Given I didn't check the services and stuff before shutting off,
you might call this pilot error. But they do say it's take-off and 
landing that's where the most problems are, even for real pilots :) 

Telsa



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