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Rebooting is for Windows

zdnet.co.uk

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Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#31

Post by whacker »

pavs wrote: post #5

One of the comment refers to netcraft for example of long Linux uptimes. According to http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html Windows have better or just as good uptime as Linux servers. (maybe I am missing something) The last time I used a MS web-server was ~10 years ago. I have almost exclusively used debian/ubuntu servers most of the time. Apart from the Linux fanboyism, what advantages does MSFT have as…

The reason Linux does not show up on those lists is because Linux uses Hi Res timers which make it impossible to guess to uptimes from tcp timestamps.

See http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html#hz1000

Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#32

Post by nailer »

slantyyz wrote: post #14
pavs wrote: post #5

One of the comment refers to netcraft for example of long Linux uptimes. According to http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html Windows have better or just as good uptime as Linux servers. (maybe I am missing something) The last time I used a MS web-server was ~10 years ago. I have almost exclusively used debian/ubuntu servers most of the time. Apart from the Linux fanboyism, what advantages does MSFT have as…

what advantages does MSFT have as a server OS? I would say support for enterprise apps. A lot of enterprise software vendors still target their development for Windows, and don't support Linux well or fail to test with Linux.

If they're Unix apps, they support Linux - RHEL is probably the most popular enterprise Unix for new projects.

Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#33

Post by timthorn »

blueben wrote: post #29
sliverstorm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually parachutes need to be used. Now, they should work and save you, but why risk it if you don't have to?

Because if you don't exercise that functionality, you will never have confidence that it will work when you need it to.

Worse - you might have false confidence that it will work, but you find out at the worst possible moment that it won't.

Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#35

Post by rbanffy »

vog wrote: post #24
rbanffy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's OK to reboot from time to time. What is not OK is to have a reboot imposed on you when you would rather continue running. It's not a huge disruption to reboot a cluster node, as long as the rest of the cluster takes the load. Rebooting makes sure the filesystem is properly scrubbed, temporary files are removed and any stale data in memory gets removed. Uptime competitions are pointless. But forced downtime (Wind…

> Uptime competitions are pointless. While uptime competitions don't indicate availability very well, they do show how much time happened since the last kernel crash or the last kernel security hole that required a kernel upgrade and thus a reboot. (Unless, of course, someone is trading security for uptime, which is luckily the exception rather the norm, at least among responsible admins.) It appears that neither Win…

Good thing in ksplice is that not all kernel updates will require a restart. I see the Ubuntu folks got very bold in pushing new kernels down the update pipe in the last couple releases.

Availablity is also somewhat overrated. Like I said, it's not the downtime that kills you, but the forced, unpredicted downtime.

Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#36

Post by rbanffy »

rbanffy wrote: post #11
ajg1977 wrote: post #10

While Windows has (and probably always will be) an OS that requires reboots for certain patches, it seems a bit biased of the article to ignore much of the work that's been done in recent (>= Server 2003) versions of the OS to minimize this, while highlighting improvements such as KSlice in Linux.

Can you move, rename or replace an open file with current Windows? That's possibly one of the reasons why it's so hard to apply patches without rebooting a Windows box. And an endless annoyance when using a Windows desktop.

That's not the point. On any decent Unix, you can overwrite any shared library that's being used and just reload the program. It's not about log files, but not having to bring down the machine in order to write an important file. That's why windows updates take eons: after the boot there are tons of files that have to be moved or renamed before the system can boot completely.

It's insane.

Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#37

Post by slantyyz »

nailer wrote: post #32
slantyyz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what advantages does MSFT have as a server OS? I would say support for enterprise apps. A lot of enterprise software vendors still target their development for Windows, and don't support Linux well or fail to test with Linux.

If they're Unix apps, they support Linux - RHEL is probably the most popular enterprise Unix for new projects.

The problem is really with testing. I know of some vendors who have versions of their SW for Linux, but don't test them --nearly-- as well as they do for their Windows versions, because most of their customers are running Windows.

And that's even before worrying about interoperability with database servers (i.e. testing on outdated *nix ODBC drivers, etc.)

Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#38

Post by nailer »

slantyyz wrote: post #37
nailer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're Unix apps, they support Linux - RHEL is probably the most popular enterprise Unix for new projects.

The problem is really with testing. I know of some vendors who have versions of their SW for Linux, but don't test them --nearly-- as well as they do for their Windows versions, because most of their customers are running Windows. And that's even before worrying about interoperability with database servers (i.e. testing on outdated *nix ODBC drivers, etc.)

Yeah, but there's vendors who do half assed Windows versions too - Oracle comes to mind. Ultimately the VB/.net shops like BMC do shitty Unix versions, the big iron companies do shitty Windows versions.

Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#39

Post by vetinari »

runjake wrote: post #20
sprout wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing about Windows (and what I think makes it an unavoidably desktop-class environment) is that there's no kernel-level support for alternate filesystems. The various Unix-likes have a variety of filesystems with a lot of innovation going on. Windows basically just has NTFS, which while ok for the desktop is only going to serve well for some types of servers.

Yes, hopefully somebody will work on this some day. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ifskit/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/IFSKit/ifskit_about.m... http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ http://www.osr.com/seminars.html

Even with IFS, you cannot boot from third-party filesystem. "Root" partition is going to be NTFS anyway.

Re: Rebooting is for Windows

#40

Post by slantyyz »

nailer wrote: post #38
slantyyz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is really with testing. I know of some vendors who have versions of their SW for Linux, but don't test them --nearly-- as well as they do for their Windows versions, because most of their customers are running Windows. And that's even before worrying about interoperability with database servers (i.e. testing on outdated *nix ODBC drivers, etc.)

Yeah, but there's vendors who do half assed Windows versions too - Oracle comes to mind. Ultimately the VB/.net shops like BMC do shitty Unix versions, the big iron companies do shitty Windows versions.

You got that right. In the end, the target platforms are the vendors prerogative.

Where you really run into problems is selling a weak Unix version into a Windows-hating shops. It ends up being more of a problem than if the vendor just told the customer "you're better off using Windows with our product".

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