blbates@AERO4.LARC.NASA.GOV ("Brent L. Bates AAD/TAB MS294 x42854") (11/13/89)
Why do you reboot your systems every night? Around here I don't know of anyone who does that once a week let along every night. During summer months I shut down our IRIS for the weeked because they shut the air conditioning off on weekends. However, during the winter I leave it up all the time and only reboot if there is a problem. -- Brent L. Bates NASA-Langley Research Center M.S. 294 Hampton, Virginia 23665-5225 (804) 864-2854 E-mail: blbates@aero4.larc.nasa.gov or blbates@aero2.larc.nasa.gov
W0L@PSUVM.BITNET ("Bill Lasher 898-6391", 814) (11/13/89)
I guess I originally got the idea at my last place of employment; they had an IBM mainframe which they IPL'd every night, just to keep things clean. As far as why I think we need to do it, there are a couple of reasons: 1. We do have occasional problems that rebooting seems to fix. Things would start to go wrong after 4 or 5 days if we didn't reboot; doing it nightly seems to have fixed those problems. 2. I think we have problems in the first place because of the environment. We are running a student lab, which runs 7 days/week. Student files are spread out all over the net, so our S.E. from SGI wrote a routine which will mount the user's files when they log on. Unfortunately, we can't unmount them automatically when they log off, so the user has to issue a command which does the unmount for them; then they can log off. Obviously, people forget, so we end up with several files mounted on each machine at the end of the day. Rebooting is the easiest way to clean up. Also, students have a tendency to do things that make programs crash more frequently than you might expect. Temporary files and other wierd things get left floating around, and rebooting cleans that up. Since students don't have root priveliges, automatic rebooting seems the prudent thing to do. I'm not sure nightly reboots are really necessary, but I can't see the harm in doing it. I would be interested in your comments. Sincerely, Bill
W0L@PSUVM.BITNET (Bill Lasher) (11/14/89)
Brent Bates writes: > Why do you reboot your systems every night? Around here I don't know >of anyone who does that once a week let along every night. During summer >months I shut down our IRIS for the weeked because they shut the air >conditioning off on weekends. However, during the winter I leave it up >all the time and only reboot if there is a problem. >-- I guess I originally got the idea at my last place of employment; they had an IBM mainframe which they IPL'd every night, just to keep things clean. As far as why I think we need to do it, there are a couple of reasons: 1. We do have occasional problems that rebooting seems to fix. Things would start to go wrong after 4 or 5 days if we didn't reboot; doing it nightly seems to have fixed those problems. We schedule it with a cron. 2. I think we have problems in the first place because of the environment. We are running a student lab, which runs 7 days/week. Student files are spread out all over the net, so our S.E. from SGI wrote a routine which will mount the user's files when they log on. Unfortunately, we can't unmount them automatically when they log off, so the user has to issue a command which does the unmount for them; then they can log off. Obviously, people forget, so we end up with several files mounted on each machine at the end of the day. Rebooting is the easiest way to clean up. Also, students have a tendency to do things that make programs crash more frequently than one might expect. Temporary files and other wierd things get left floating around, and rebooting cleans that up. Since students don't have root priveliges, automatic rebooting seems the prudent thing to do. I'm not sure nightly reboots are really necessary, but I can't see the harm in doing it. I would be interested in any comments.