Alpha uptime

[miker_alpha]

Congratulations!
Polarhome Alpha uptime has passed 100 days.

MikeR

[zoli]

hahaha... this alpha server used to have uptime more than a year. That uptime is so low is the old UPS's fault.

BTW have you seen Dillon's SuSE?

Code: Select all

Welcome to Linux version 2.6.16.13-4-default at suse.polarhome.com !

  3:14am  up 474 days  5:08,  0 users,  load average: 0.15, 0.22, 0.22


This is a nice uptime for a teenage admin

[miker_alpha]

I've only reached 80-odd days on my Alpha at home (My UPS only lasts for 5 minutes) but next time before I reboot I'll take the opportunity of running a full system backup.

MikeR

[zoli]

I think that the uptime is not always the relevant as a measurement of stability.

You can have a box on a stable electricity doing nothing (or at least not security sensitive tasks) for ages.

From other side, if you upgrade your system and try to keep it up to date with recent security patches -it is almost impossible to have high uptime, because in most of the cases a reboot is needed to activate the new kernel.

To be honest, I prefer an up to date system with lower uptime.

[afonic]

This is true, especially in Dillon's box even though the uptime is very impressive, the old kernel has some security issues, especially a couple of local user privilege escalation fixes which are pretty serious for a server like one in Polarhome that hundred of users have ssh access.

Besides that, even though most Linux filesystems are pretty stable, rebooting and checking them for errors before mounting again can sometimes prevent corruption problems.

A few minutes of downtime 2 or 3 times a year are nothing if it ensures the system is up to date and healthy imo.

[miker_alpha]

Well, there are a couple of things (PHP, Apache, MySQL) in the TODO list that should perhaps be upgraded on Alpha Polarhome, but the primary requirement is to upgrade the OS to V7.3-2 or V8.3 -- which can only be done on-site (Swapping CDs, rebooting...)

Zoli: If you, in your ample free time upgrade the OS, I could probably upgrade Apache (CSWS) and PHP, and install basic MySQL
I have done this on my home system and it's fairly uncomplicated.

OTOH -- except for MySQL: It's running now, why change? As far as I know there are no security holes in the current versions, though I could easily be wrong.

MikeR

[zoli]

Mike,

polarhome's alpha (and vax) are intentionally not upgraded to higher VMS versions, because these servers provide binary distributions/executable for Vim and ctags.

As VMS run-time libraries are backwards compatible - it is essential to keep these systems on as low as possible version (7.3 for alpha and 7.2 for vax).

Another issue is that I haven't got a single request to run mysql on VMS, so far - specially that polarhome has a plenty of other hosts to run programs that require apache/php/mysql environment.

Therefore I would suggest to keep these system as they are - basically ECO patches are OK, but no version upgrades.