Maximum uptime 497 days?

Jesper Wallin z3l3zt at hackunite.net
Mon Jun 28 10:06:03 PDT 2004


Heya..

Heh, sure, I do agree that alot of people do almost everything to avoid a reboot.. but
yet, MySQL (or any other daemon) is a quite bad example since it's not a part of the
base system. You can update ALL kind of daemons without a reboot.. But sure, it's better
to be safe than sorry and high uptime is mostly a lack of security but yet a proof of
stability. :)


Regards,
Jesper Wallin


> Matt Douhan <matt at fruitsalad.org> wrote:
>  > On Monday 28 June 2004 16.03, Oliver Fromme wrote:
>  > > Rob <stopspam at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>  > > > By accident I happen to come across this remarkable limit of
>  > > > uptime registration for FreeBSD systems. After 497 days, the
>  > > > timer jumps to zero again.
>  > > >
>  > > > 497 days is less than a 1.5 years !
>  > >
>  > > I'd be very embarrassed to have machines with that a high
>  > > uptime -- It means that they haven't been updated for that
>  > > a long time and are probably full of security holes.  ;-)
>  >
>  > why ?
>  >
>  > they may not be public machines at all and be isolated to an environment where
>  > security is not the primary concern
>
> You did notice the smiley, didn't you?
>
> But seriously, I think that the widespread uptime fetishism
> is somewhat dangerous.  People often try hard to avoid
> rebooting machines, just in order to "save their precious
> uptime", even if there are good reasons to reboot.
>
> A machine with 1.5 years of uptime -- be it in an isolated
> environment or not -- has accumulated the bugs of 1.5 years
> that have been fixed in the latest version of the OS, so to
> speak.
>
> In fact there is software which I wouldn't want to run even
> if it were outdated for only a few days.  Mysql is one such
> example.  Every time I looked at the huge list of bugs that
> have been fixed in the latest version, I almost got a heart
> attack.  (Changing to PostgreSQL was very healthy.)
>
> Those are just my opinions, of course, and YMMV.
>
> I'm very sorry, it got quite off-topic by now.
>
> Best regards
>    Oliver
>
> --
> Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
> Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
> and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.
>
> "One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
> lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination
> of their C programs."
>         -- Robert Firth
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