Best practice for production servers: To reboot or not to reboot?

[dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 02:30:11PM -0400, Robert La Ferla wrote:
> So now I'll refine my question. The servers that we're using are Solaris and are running various services including Java app servers, NFS, SMTP, and others. 
> 
> If a server isn't rebooted on say an annual basis, fsck doesn't get run. Drive mounts that were added but not made permanent won't get remounted. Configuration changes and network changes may affect the reboot. Given this, is it better to never reboot or reboot on a periodic basis. 


It is good to never have to reboot.

It is better to reboot in a controlled situation when you have
time to recover from entropy.

It is best to have systems automation sufficient to prevent having
temporary drive mounts, unexpected config changes, and so forth.

-dsr-

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