Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 12:52:41 -0500 From: Skylar Thompson <skylar@cs.earlham.edu> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Maximum uptime 497 days? Message-ID: <20040630175241.GC54215@quark.cs.earlham.edu> In-Reply-To: <200406281644.i5SGiM0h097809@lurza.secnetix.de> References: <200406281706.11188.matt@fruitsalad.org> <200406281644.i5SGiM0h097809@lurza.secnetix.de>
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--Fig2xvG2VGoz8o/s Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 06:44:22PM +0200, Oliver Fromme wrote: > You did notice the smiley, didn't you? >=20 > 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. >=20 > 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. >=20 > 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 if it were outdated for only a few days.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. --=20 -- Skylar Thompson (skylar@cs.earlham.edu) -- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/ --Fig2xvG2VGoz8o/s Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFA4v3psc4yyULgN4YRAtJ6AJ482YuZFigC6+QmUua0aCOhiGY4EwCfd8yo WvUp+m8ecT/tSthBTZC+B7I= =4FWq -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --Fig2xvG2VGoz8o/s--
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