Wolfgang Strobl wrote:
On 25 Oct 2000, at 16:00, J. Atwood wrote:
"Months without rebooting"?
That is certainly not something to brag about.
Huh? Did anybody? Certainly not me. :-{
In case I didn't make myself clear: for running Zope; I don't care much whether the OS needs a reboot every month, every year, or every decade, when I have to upgrade and/or restart Zope for installing Hotfixes and/or new products, every other month, anyway.
OK, tim e fo rme to weigh in on this. Reboot frequency is a matter of experience and perspective. If you are used to uptimes measured in years, or 'always on' environments, then NT's uptime rates are abject failures. That's not a slight, it is a statement of fact that even Mr. Gates himself agrees with and understands. If, on the other hand, you don't come from that background or need, and are not used to that type of environment, a few months to six months to nearly a year can mean something to you. So, this is *one* of the reasons we see these arguments about uptime from both sides of the windows vs everything else uptime wars. Some measure days, some months, and otehrs measure in terms of years.
With three of my installations of Zope on Linux I have the machines at 194, 204 and 55 days of uptime (and the 55 was because of a bad powerstrip, the other others have been up since I brought them up).
So what. I'm using an old 3.51 server on one of my companies intranets here, serving as a backup domain controller plus a few other, less important services, which is running for about half a year now (power failure in the machine room, too). That machine has begun life as a OS/2 Lanmanager server (ca '90), and has been upgraded almost seamlessly again and again, both in hardware and in software, since.
And has been rebooted to perfrom those upgrades (software, the hardware is obvious), has it not?
While NT can and does stay up for long periods of time, it still is a very poor server choice as anything you install leads to a reboot.
Well, W2K certainly has more capabilities here, and Linux, for example, is somewhat better in some (!) areas, but "anything" is a gross exaggeration.
While I agree that 'anything' is a poor choice of words, unless you are changing kernels and/or glibc, Linux does not require a reboot for install of any software (that I am aware of, and that is a high amount of software mind you). There is work in progress to alleviate that as well. Not quickly, as it is a rather complex undertaking, but it is ongoing. IIRC, kernel 2.4 will/does have support for hot swappable PCI devices on hardware that has it (yes, you can get Intel-compat hardware with that). Last I checked, if you try to hot-swap a keyboard or mouse, all versions minus 2k (haven't tried it there), will die. As far as 'lack of need to reboot' goes when concerning upgrades, Linux wins hands down.. So, the question regarding uptime is more a question of needs. Some of us need 24x7 availablility, and 5 nines. Some do not. For those of us needing 5 nines, we can use Unix/Linux to provide that. If you don't need it (and not everyone does), use other criteria more appropriate to your needs. -- E PLURIBUS LINUX