Scheduled reboot?

tobiascapin · 10-21-2009, 05:43 AM

Hello, i have a little Dell server with Debian 5 with samba and a webserver. I would like to know if you suggest to schedule a server reboot or do you think this is not usefult for server stability?
I thought to reboot the server at 2 AM, or better to shutdown it at 0AM and poweron (if I can setup it by its bios) at 7AM.

What do you think?
Thanks.

linuxlover.chaitanya · 10-21-2009, 06:07 AM

Personally I would not do this. If you have got some special requirements where in reboot or shutdown is necessary, you could do that but if there is no such requirement, why do it?
Both Dell servers and Debian are robust products and would definitely run without issues on months together.
There have been instances where Linux servers were not rebooted for several months or year or so.

EricTRA · 10-21-2009, 06:09 AM

Hello,

I have several Debian servers (10) running at our office and none of them has a scheduled reboot configured. We also have Windoze servers (45) and they need a regular reboot. In my opinion a scheduled reboot is not necessary on a Linux server if it's administered correctly.

Kind regards,

Eric

Tux-Slack · 10-21-2009, 06:13 AM

Only time you really need to reboot is when you upgrade your kernel. So why do it daily?
Even so, what's the point of a server if it gets shut down at midnight and booted up again at 7am?

acid_kewpie · 10-21-2009, 06:18 AM

how does a scheduled reboot improve stability? It admits / assumes that you have VERY BAD stability already... this isn't windows... why would you want to restart a server that is working fine?

catkin · 10-21-2009, 06:24 AM

The only reason for doing so would be electrical energy conservation -- think of the penguins -- but even then the thermal cycling may make components fail early and there's a lot of energy invested in creating them. If you're running AC to extract the heat created by used electrical energy then the savings are more significant.

tobiascapin · 10-21-2009, 07:06 AM

Thanks you all,
i thounght to reboot becausa i came from a windows sistem

... so you can understand my question!
Furthermore, I think that 7 hours per day of poweroff can be good for the components stress and maybe can reduce the hardware failure (-30% of use)... but maybe is a bad idea just because i'm very new of server administration.

Thanks again, i think i will not schedule reboot ...

Bye

acid_kewpie · 10-21-2009, 10:04 AM

-30% use, but on average 1000x more spinups and spindowns, etc... change of physical state = wear & tear.

linuxlover.chaitanya · 10-22-2009, 02:10 AM

I would disagree OP that shutdown and reboot would increase the life expectancy of components. It should rather be opposite of what you think.
The more you reboot the machine, more the temperature variations components have to handle. The more the temperature variations, more the wear and tear. That would in turn reduce the life of your hardware.

tobiascapin · 10-22-2009, 02:26 AM

I did not know that... thanks again.
Do you think that in a good server must be installed something as monit?
This is not a big server and this has nothing so important (file sharing and a management web application).. but i don't know if a process crash can be happend often.

Bye

linuxlover.chaitanya · 10-22-2009, 02:30 AM

It would depend on the usage. If you have got a good hardware resources and you think your memory would seldom be a problem and no process will die for lack of memory then you can do without it. But it is a personal choice. Monit is just an application. If you think you do not need complex monitoring, you can use some simple to use monitoring like top, ntop and all.
But it is definitely suggested that you do monitoring in some form.

avijitp · 10-22-2009, 04:41 AM

This tends to happen to any SA who has earlier worked on Windows. I have seen server having uptime for more that 3000 days (They were not patched due to some business need) and serving happily ever after.