Reboots

Ola Thoresen redhat at olen.net
Sun Oct 19 21:25:25 UTC 2003


This might not be the right list, but hopefully some of the right people will
read it anyway.

I am currently working for a company with several linux servers, most of them
running redhat.  From time to time these will need a reboot. We have had
nfsd-processes hanging around that never dies and eventually causes other
processes to hang. We have had httpd-processes refusing to die and so on.
This is not our main concern, as this is not very common - maybe once a year
for each server - but with 50-60 servers this might turn out to be a reboot a 
week.  The reality is not that bad, but from time to time a reboot must be
issued.

The main issue about a reboot is not the 5 ot 10 min. downtime when the server 
boots, but the fact that quite often, the reboot will not complete.
When we reboot, it is because all other ways of resolving an issue is tested
and have failed, and then, quite often, init 6 will not work either.
Killall fails, so it hangs forever. The server does not manage to turn of swap, 
some disk can not be umounted or other such issues.

There should be some sort of a timer that will _really_ kill the system if
init 6 has not completed in N minutes.
We can live with 10 minutes wait before the system reboots, but some of our
servers are located in rooms and buildings where it is more or less
impossible to get access out of business-hours, and we can not allways live
with it offline for a whole weekend.

This might be part of the discussion about faster shutdowns, but just
please remember that certain reboots might be as important.


Rgds.

Ola Thoresen



-- 
         _,--',   _._.--._____
  .--.--';_'-.', ";_      _.,-'   Ola Thoresen 
 .'--'.  _.'    {`'-;_ .-.>.'    
       '-:_      )  / `' '=.      It is easier to fix Unix 
         ) >     {_/,     /~)     than to live with Windows
         |/               `^ .' 
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