Update/reboot frequencey [Was: Solaris -- can I add a SCSI target without a reconfigure reboot?]

Fri Jul 6 17:13:44 PDT 2007

On Fri, Jul 06, 2007 at 04:57:25PM -0700, Russ Witte wrote:
> On a slightly different note ... I know we all brag about how long our
> systems stay up without a reboot, but in terms of security and/or
> configuration and hardware validation isn't it a good idea to reboot
> occasionally? Maybe no more than a couple times a year, but still ...
> 
> What's the general consensus? I try to keep my Sun systems patched, maybe
> 2-4 times a year, so that takes care of it. What do other people do?

I doubt much of a concensus is likely to be reached:  even among my own
systems, it varies greatly; for example:

* On my laptop, I keep a local private mirror of the FreeBSD CVS
  repository that is updatedd every night (in two steps).  Every
  morning, I then use that CVS repository to update sourcess for
  FreeBSD STABLE (RELENG_6) and CURRENT (HEAD), as well as the
  /usr/ports tree.

  Every day that the STABLE /usr/src tree is updated, I rebuild FreeBSD.
  (It usually does change, save for maybe a dozen days per year.)

  I then reboot the newly-built FreeBSD STABLE and run a variation on
  "portupgrade -a" (to update any ports that have been modified) and
  update the  CURRENT /usr/src (which is  on a different "slice" of the
  disk).

  That done, I reboot to the CURRENT slice and rebuild FreeBSD CURRENT.
  (It's very rare for CURRENT to fail to change from one day to the
  next.)  (There was a fair amount of "turbulence" involved in getting
  CURRENT built today.  :-}  That happens sometimes.)

  So  at the moment, the machine is running:

g1-18(6.2-S)[1] uname -a
FreeBSD g1-18.catwhisker.org. 6.2-STABLE FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE #443: Thu Jul  5 06:16:45 PDT 2007     root at g1-18.catwhisker.org.:/common/S1/obj/usr/src/sys/CANARY  i386
g1-18(6.2-S)[2] 

* My work desktop gets similar treatment, but only every Sunday.

* When I still had a working dedicated "build machine" at home, I did
  the daily builds on it (as well as  the laptop); on Sundays, I'd also
  update the ports from the build machine to my 2 "production" machines
  at home, and every other Sunday, I'd install the recently-built
  snapshot of FreeBSD-STABLE on those machines.

Each of the above examples is rather more frequent change than I'd
suggest for most other folks, though.  :-}

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Anything and everything is a (potential) cat toy.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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