

Rebooting is for Windows - aoos
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/the-open-source-revolution-10014902/rebooting-is-for-windows-10018087/

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pavs
One of the comment refers to netcraft for example of long Linux uptimes.
According to <http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html> Windows have
better or just as good uptime as Linux servers. (maybe I am missing something)

The last time I used a MS web-server was ~10 years ago. I have almost
exclusively used debian/ubuntu servers most of the time. Apart from the Linux
fanboyism, what advantages does MSFT have as a server OS?

~~~
Pengwin
Exchange; that is quite a huge one for businesses where I am. Many people are
just so used to outlook for email that when it comes for them to put in some
kind of email management architecture they will always go exchange.

~~~
slantyyz
There are some non-Windows Exchange alternatives that would be transparent to
Outlook users, but it's probably an uphill battle selling them to management.

~~~
nailer
Yes. You'll have better chance selling a new paradigm (cloud based, no clients
to deploy, no individual mail server mattering) than a opened version of the
old paradigm (which is still controlled by the proprietary vendor).

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nailer
Yes. Shutting down every app, the OS kernel, and firmware, and restarting them
for anything beyond a major OS upgrade is a reminder that Windows remains a
desktop class OS.

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ajg1977
While Windows has (and probably always will be) an OS that requires reboots
for certain patches, it seems a bit biased of the article to ignore much of
the work that's been done in recent (>= Server 2003) versions of the OS to
minimize this, while highlighting improvements such as KSlice in Linux.

~~~
rbanffy
Can you move, rename or replace an open file with current Windows? That's
possibly one of the reasons why it's so hard to apply patches without
rebooting a Windows box. And an endless annoyance when using a Windows
desktop.

~~~
wizard_2
Can you remove a logfile on linux/unix while something is using it? Of course
you can but the open file will stay around in limbo. It wont free up space,
the program that holds it open will write to the deleted file, etc. Most linux
programs will let you send it a nohup and it will close and reopen the
logfile, that's something I haven't a clue about on windows.

I still pipe logs to a separate process that checks if the logfile is deleted
and reopens/creates the logfile, its just easier.

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cparedes
If your intention is to totally remove the space that's occupied by the log
file, you'll probably want to pipe /dev/null into the file:

cat /dev/null > /path/to/logfile

~~~
whacker
That does not do what you think it does.

Your command will make /path/to/logfile fill up all available space on the
disk. To truncate that file, which is probably what you wanted to do, you
should

`echo > /path/to/logfile`

~~~
DerKommissar
His command does exactly what he says it does. Your command truncates the file
and then writes a newline into it.

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kgo
Eventually your hardware will fail. If you can't even safely reboot your
machines under controlled circumstances, you've already lost the uptime
battle.

~~~
lurkinggrue
I have run into problems where the machine would not survive reboot after
updates but did not find this out after months.

~~~
rbanffy
It's OK to reboot from time to time. What is not OK is to have a reboot
imposed on you when you would rather continue running. It's not a huge
disruption to reboot a cluster node, as long as the rest of the cluster takes
the load.

Rebooting makes sure the filesystem is properly scrubbed, temporary files are
removed and any stale data in memory gets removed.

Uptime competitions are pointless.

But forced downtime (Windows Update-style) is unacceptable.

~~~
vog
_> Uptime competitions are pointless._

While uptime competitions don't indicate availability very well, they do show
how much time happened since the last kernel crash or the last kernel security
hole that required a kernel upgrade and thus a reboot.

(Unless, of course, someone is trading security for uptime, which is luckily
the exception rather the norm, at least among responsible admins.)

It appears that neither Windows nor Linux work particularly well here, but the
BSD systems are quite impressive in that regard, especially OpenBSD.

~~~
rbanffy
Good thing in ksplice is that not all kernel updates will require a restart. I
see the Ubuntu folks got very bold in pushing new kernels down the update pipe
in the last couple releases.

Availablity is also somewhat overrated. Like I said, it's not the downtime
that kills you, but the forced, unpredicted downtime.

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runjake
I agree with the people who are disparaging Windows Server OSes as still being
desktop class. Coming from a VMS/VAX background, I feel much the same towards
Linux.

~~~
sprout
The biggest thing about Windows (and what I think makes it an unavoidably
desktop-class environment) is that there's no kernel-level support for
alternate filesystems.

The various Unix-likes have a variety of filesystems with a lot of innovation
going on. Windows basically just has NTFS, which while ok for the desktop is
only going to serve well for some types of servers.

~~~
runjake
Yes, hopefully somebody will work on this some day.

<http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ifskit/default.mspx>
[http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/IFSKit/ifskit_about.m...](http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/IFSKit/ifskit_about.mspx)
<http://www.fs-driver.org/>
<http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx>
<http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/> <http://www.osr.com/seminars.html>

~~~
sprout
Sorry, is that sarcasm? I honestly can't tell. Yes, people have implemented
filesystems other than NTFS for Windows. NTFS is however the only one I
personally would trust on a production server, especially for the system
partition.

Linux, by contrast, has a variety of filesystems that are as stable if not
more so than NTFS, and ready for production use on your root partition.

Linux probably has some catching up to do with respect to Solaris and the
BSDs, but it has a good cut above desktop class filesystem support.

~~~
runjake
I was referring to your original point that Windows didn't not have kernel-
level support for alternate filesystems.

Obviously I don't know your use scenarios, but I can think of 2 Linux
filesystems that I'd trust to varying extents and they both begin with "ext".

That said, I use the right tool for the right job. Much of the time it's
Linux, and sometimes it's Windows 2008. Thank FSM the VMS boxes are
gone.Platform agnosticism is a valuable trait to have.

Professionally, I haven't had a real use for anything other than NTFS on a
wide variety of Windows servers, all the way up to double-digit TBs of data.
What situations have you found NTFS inadequate for your needs?

My desktop has no direct need to handle millions of database transactions and
terabytes of data, but it's nice that it can with NTFS.

~~~
Twirrim
Why the obsession with using one or the other? Why not see that both have
their appropriate uses, strengths and weaknesses?

My focus as a Sysadmin is Linux, purely by nature of the type of work I'm in,
so I tend to keep up only with the benchmarks relevant to me.

If you're only seeing ext2 & 3 as mature and stable you've missed great file
systems like XFS.

ext2 & 3 are great all-rounders, but XFS will knock them into a top hat when
it comes to larger files, with lower CPU usage and disk ops. It'll also beat
ext2 and ext3 if you're creating and deleting lots of small files (like on an
e-mail server) as the delete will take place in the background without
impacting the front end systems. It's nice and mature too (16 years old). ext2
& 3 have slightly better error recovery though. XFS is journalled so very
little should go wrong that would impact it.

JFS has strengths when large files are moved around on it, extremely low
sector overhead (less than 1%) and very low CPU usage, amongst the lowest of
any of the main Linux ones.

NTFS has no knowledge of checksumming, something ZFS, ext4 and btrfs handle
(the latter two I wouldn't trust yet in production environments), but it does
have integrated snapshots, something you generally have to use LVM for under
Linux, and native encryption, and from Vista/2003 onwards supports shrinking
and expansion directly on the fly (again LVM is necessary to do this under
linux, and is best done with filesystem offline).

You chose your operating system and file system to suit the task (for example
I'd use OpenBSD on a gateway machine instead of Linux as it's more suited to
the role).

It's such a simple concept, like how you wouldn't use a hammer to crack an
egg. You could, but you might find the edge of a knife or a spoon a lot easier
and neater.

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jsz0
I don't keep up on enterprise Linux stuff much but after reading this it
concerns me that Linux seems to have better in-place upgrade support than most
of Cisco's big iron stuff I've worked with. The 10000 series routers I
presently work with only recently got support for in-place upgrades and it has
a list of caveats a mile long. From a network architecture standpoint you
can't always (affordably) design around downtime but at least your servers can
stay up while your network is done now.

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tedunangst
Not to say it's not cool, but saying "Look how much cooler linux is because of
ksplice" is kind of silly considering determina was doing this years ago for
Windows.

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gmlk
Well, that is at least one of the advantages of Common Lisp… ;)

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InclinedPlane
Windows has greatly improved in this regard but it's still a huge pain point.
I believe that the frequency of required reboots after patches is likely a
leading cause for machines remaining unpatched.

Ultimately it comes down to lack of having "no reboots" as a clear goal. SQL
Server has a pretty strong goal of being able to patch a running server
without rebooting and they do a good job meeting that goal. For Windows OS it
comes down to programmer laziness winning over in the absence of a directive
to avoid reboots.

