Do you ever reboot? If so why?

[Worf Maugg]

I have heard you never need to reboot. I also heard that every (30) days is a good bench mark. Will bad things happen if you don't? Any tips on maintaince? I'm at 48 days for my quake server box. The servers play just as they did the day I brought them up. At this point my windows box would not have enough memory to come out of the screen saver :p

[sarah31]

Reboot, yes, every so often is fine. I like to actually power down and let everything cool and rest at least once a month. Will anything bad happen? Not necessarily, I just find that if you leave any OS running too long the chance of crashing seems to increase as well.

[ 19 November 2001: Message edited by: sarah31 ]

[Strike]

I pretty much only reboot to upgrade my kernel (which is, on average, about every 2-3 weeks).

[slacker_x]

The last two times I rebooted were for kernel updates ;)

[chikn]

I cant seem to make apache completely reload when I add vhosts so about the only time I reload any servers are after I add one.(my servers only)

Havent rebooted my desktop at home, hhmmm, uptime 45 days

Work needed a reoot last week after a month due to some runaway processes that wouldnt die.

[teeitup]

I have two file servers in the lab. uptime 145 days. I had to reboot to move them.
This desktop 28 days and counting.

[camelrider]

I shutdown every few months to vacum the dust out of my box. Last time I waited too long and was getting segfaults when compiling. When I opened the box, there was so much dust in there that my cpu-fan couldn't start spinning without a manual boost, so I guess the segfaults were from overheating. (sig11) This room is a nightmare environment for electronics!

[hiroku]

i reboot for kernel upgrades. and even those aren't very often. my router/firewall redhat 6.2 box has a 148 day uptime right now and this machine (slackware 8.0) i haven't rebooted since installing slack on it 70 days ago. my debian box, however, i dual boot with windows and well, games and dvd's are still a bit better in windows than potato :-/ oh and my laptop i keep off most of the time. all in all it's a noisy network in my little one-bedroom apartment :)

[jon787]

Whenever I feel the need to play my DOS/Windows games.

[fateswarm]

Why should you leave a home machine on, for more than the time you use it?

ps.(unless it serves sth)

-- Electricity costs.

and

-- Less machine life

[SWFan]

Generally I only reboot because I had to boot to Windows. There has been three cases where I've come to my computer (in Linux) and its been completely locked up. In those cases I had to hard reset since the keyboard and screen would completely locked up.

[DJKAOS]

I turn my computer off every night because the fans are to damn loud and I cant sleep with it on. :)

[deadlock]

I have an old dual PII 266 that sounds like a drill when the fans get going, so i never leave that on - it keeps the entire household awake and sets the cat off whinging :). My main box now is a not quite-so-old PII 400, which is generally fairly quiet - except when the DVD-ROM spins up (hint: don't leave a CD/DVD in the drive!), but I rarely leave that on overnight, since I have no real reason to. Boot up times don't bother me - I work with ECI multiplexers, some of the cards for these things have boot-up times of over 15 minutes, so 1-1.5 mins. for a PC means nothing and makes for a handy oppurtunity to make some tea.

Sometimes I delude myself that I'm SKO 3D artiste and I leave a render running overnight, but I generally get disillusioned by the results that I awaken to, so that's rare.

All that said, if I boot up in the morning, I'll generally leave the machine running all day and shut it down when I go to bed.

[Icarus]

Mine at home tend to be rebooted weekly (I really don't know why I do, longest my server has been up without a reboot is 2 weeks :p) At work I have a Red Hat 6.2 that it's sole porpous is to ping my Unix server and let me know if it doesn't respond, it's uptime is 145...hmmm, someone rebooted it back in june/july...I should look into that, we haven't had a power outage in over a year here...This should have an uptime of about 300 days :p

[Ludootje]

Originally posted by Strike:
<STRONG>I pretty much only reboot to upgrade my kernel (which is, on average, about every 2-3 weeks).</STRONG>
a kernel ugrade every 3weeks? as far as i know, there isn't a newer version of the kernel available every 3 weeks.. :confused:

[bdg1983]

Originally posted by Ludootje:
<STRONG>
a kernel ugrade every 3weeks? as far as i know, there isn't a newer version of the kernel available every 3 weeks.. :confused:</STRONG>

Usually a new kernel is released every 3 to 4 weeks though I've seen 2 in one week.

[Strike]

Originally posted by Ludootje:
<STRONG>a kernel ugrade every 3weeks? as far as i know, there isn't a newer version of the kernel available every 3 weeks.. :confused:</STRONG>

I also used to do certain kernel patches when they came out (ext3, but now it's in the main tree), and sometimes I'll do pre patches.

[PimpHolic]

Originally posted by DJKAOS:
<STRONG>I turn my computer off every night because the fans are to damn loud and I cant sleep with it on. :)</STRONG>

i feel for you ;)
i need to turn my computer off unless im downloading something big (once every 2 weeks or so) and have to leave it on overnight
i find that it is nice and fresh in the morning

[MkIII_Supra]

I reboot my AMD 500MHz at work so I can get into W2K when I need to. Otherwise my AMD 700MHz at home only gets rebooted when the system locks up, Which with mandrake 8.0 was about every 8 days. Otherwise I leave the CPU running. Only time I shut down or reboot is to clean, move or because Linux acted like windows and locked up.

So far though SuSE has been playing very nice! I am currently at 4 days 23 hours and 27 minutes uptime on this install. And the way things are looking this will be up for at least another 100 days unless SuSE decides to emulate Win98.

As far as power and letting the hardware cool off, the power issue is miniscule at best for an idle CPU, the monitor consumes gobs of power though. As far as letting the system cool, that isn't exactly a good idea, contrary to another post here it shortens hardware life. The constant expansion / contraction of hardware as you start and stop it is harder on it that leaving it running at a relativly constant temp. If you are worried about power consumption then turn your monitor off. Leave the system powered up otherwise. Less wear and tear on the components. I posted an in depth analysis of the affects of starting and stopping your PC, it's here in the forums somewhere.... at least it used to be. I used a lot of thermal dynamic theory and application in the analysis.

Whatever....