[Zope] OT:NT and rebooting

[Bill Anderson]

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