was Re: fsck now reboot

[Bill Lasher]

Brent Bates writes:

>   Why do you reboot your systems every night?  Around here I don't know
>of anyone who does that once a week let along every night.  During summer
>months I shut down our IRIS for the weeked because they shut the air
>conditioning off on weekends.  However, during the winter I leave it up
>all the time and only reboot if there is a problem.
>--

I guess I originally got the idea at my last place of employment; they had an
IBM mainframe which they IPL'd every night, just to keep things clean.

As far as why I think we need to do it, there are a couple of reasons:

1. We do have occasional problems that rebooting seems to fix.  Things would
start to go wrong after 4 or 5 days if we didn't reboot; doing it nightly seems
to have fixed those problems.  We schedule it with a cron.

2. I think we have problems in the first place because of the environment.  We
are running a student lab, which runs 7 days/week.  Student files are spread
out all over the net, so our S.E. from SGI wrote a routine which will mount the
user's files when they log on.  Unfortunately, we can't unmount them
automatically when they log off, so the user has to issue a command which does
the unmount for them; then they can log off.  Obviously, people forget, so
we end up with several files mounted on each machine at the end of the day.
Rebooting is the easiest way to clean up.

Also, students have a tendency to do things that make programs crash more
frequently than one might expect.  Temporary files and other wierd things get
left floating around, and rebooting cleans that up.  Since students don't have
root priveliges, automatic rebooting seems the prudent thing to do.

I'm not sure nightly reboots are really necessary, but I can't see the harm in
doing it.  I would be interested in any comments.