[BUGS] question on up keeping of a production server

[Edwin Groothuis]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 04:55:46PM +1000, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 06, 2008 at 03:50:44PM +1000, Brad Rushworth wrote:
> > Edwin Groothuis wrote on 6/06/2008 8:33 AM:
> > > If freebsd-update doesn't say you need to reboot, then it isn't
> > > necssary. Of course, shared libraries in use etc need to be restarted
> > > after being updated.
> > 
> > I reboot to be safe, but I suppose you only need to in certain 
> > circumstances (kernel updates etc).
> 
> To my mind, rebooting is also usually far the fastest way to be
> sure that the necessary libraries and services have been
> restarted.  You'd want to be *very* certain of what had been
> upgraded, and what the dependencies were, to know exactly which
> rc.d knobs to restart manually.  No doubt there are people with
> that level of expertise, and systems for which even the tiniest
> downtime is worth avoiding.  I'm glad I'm not in one of those
> situations....

If the services on that system are so valuable that you can't afford
a single second of downtime, you are doing it wrong by not having
a second machine which can be used to fallover in case the first
breaks. Or needs a reboot :-)

Edwin
-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |              Weblog: http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/