Maximum uptime 497 days?

Skylar Thompson skylar at cs.earlham.edu
Wed Jun 30 10:52:48 PDT 2004


On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 06:44:22PM +0200, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> 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 if it were outdated for only a few days.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.)

A lot of security holes can be patched without rebooting. In general, only
kernel updates strictly require a reboot. There have been a few kernel
security vulnerabilities released in the past couple years, but a lot of
them are for DoS attacks, not privelege escelation.

-- 
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar at cs.earlham.edu)
-- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/
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