How often do you reboot your server
 

Or do you not? I've had my spanky new dedicated box for a couple of months now so I know very little about how it should be maintained (tires kicked, oil changes, and shit like that). Do you ever reboot your server for kicks or do you just let it run and run and run until something goes wrong?

Two schools of thought on this...

Old School says you should do a graceful restart of the server every X days/months, because even if everything seems to be working there may be runaway and/or zombie processes eating resources and a reboot will clean them out.

New School says the only time to reboot an xNix box is when you have to (e.g. kernel rebuild, etc).

Who's right? Probably both. LOL

I never reboot anything unless it needs an upgrade or it is acting funky.

The server that my LL is on needed to be rebooted once last year because MySQL was acting up. It then needed to be rebooted again when it was decided that an upgrade was needed to take of the issue that caused it to need rebooting.

I can't remember the last time my other server was rebooted. This is the one that I do all my TGPing off of.

As far as maintenance a nightly rub down of WD40 while reading them erotic stories seems to do wonders for my sales.

Careful....I hear that causes nose bleeds.

D'oh! Well then, I suppose I should do both. I'm going to start playing rock paper scissors with myself whenever I get the urge to reboot. That should solve it.

:D we are talking about your server here... aren't we.... not anything else...

DD

$ uptime
14:52:12 up 271 days, 14:34

I think it might have been 271 days I got a bigger HD put in to the server. So my answer is, I never reboot unless it's necessary.

I pay National Net to worry about these things :D

Thought you had accunett doing the management?

I'm pretty happy to have managed hosting. :D

|couch|

restart services when needed (usually have to when adding new accounts)
reboot the boxes only when necessary.

I'm a fucking renegade! I never got around to it. Installed a couple of firewalls and dicked with it a bit with some online tutorials a while back. It seems to be happy thus far. I figured I'd hire a management company when the shit hits the fan.:D

When ever I add another domain I seem to have to restart exim in order to kick start email for the new domain. Otherwise I try not to touch the thing. Don't want to hex my good fortune.

Well, you're tight with a nickel as well. :D

Shhh...Don't tell anyone.
This thread just got me doing some more security crap though, which is good (and necessary). Just installed a couple trojan scanners and mod_security for Apache. The server is still running and my sites are still displaying so I guess I didn't screw up to much.

Note to self-get server management.

I'm on 196 days since a reboot. I believe in the "If its not broke, don't fix it" mentality. Of course my host manages my servers mostly but I do have root just in case something serious happens and I can fix it quickly.

Most unix boxes can run for a long time before rebooting. I once had one run for 2 years without rebooting.

You using Ensim? Ut oh!

Depending on the version, you need to reboot every couple of months. In the older versions there is an error about uptime. The only time I found this to be an issue though is when you add new domains.

Also, watch the size of your log files or you'll be rebooting when you dont want to.

Tip: Change your log rotate to daily instead of weekly for every domain and the server. And for those server-application logs that dont rotate, if any, just delete the info, but leave the file. The magic number is 2gig. *nix boxes choke on files that large.

Good Luck!

-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 4571791360 2005-01-25 12:50 ibdata
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 5242880 2005-01-25 12:50 ib_logfile0
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 5242880 2005-01-25 12:50 ib_logfile1

-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 8696 May 14 2003 sgh_sites.frm
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 4060223536 Jan 25 09:06 sgh_stats.MYD
-rw-rw---- 1 mysql mysql 3555355648 Jan 25 09:06 sgh_stats.MYI

I guess I better tell Linux that those files should be causing problems.

Dont do that, tell mine is not suppose to choke! hahahaha