
Daily WTF: ITAPPMONROBOT - nickb
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/ITAPPMONROBOT.aspx
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gibsonf1
A great story - I even felt a bit of compassion for the poor old serverbot
sitting in the corner when it was neglected and no longer needed.

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jgrahamc
Nice idea, but a pity that they couldn't just buy an intelligent power switch
that was IP addressable. That's how I manage the worst case scenario for my
servers.

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kirubakaran
"Budget Freeze", remember?

Embrace your constraints :-)

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qaexl
Someone should make an indie film out of this.

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edw519
I have a client whose background process crashes once or twice a month (thank
you Windows). The management dashboard checks a data base and includes a
warning message if the process hasn't run in the past hour. Since "someone"
checks the dashboard every 5 minutes or so anyway, action can be taken to
restart the background process.

But what if, for some reason, no one checks the management dashboard for
hours? I was recently asked if there was a better way. "You have 2 options,
either (a) upgrade to Unix and reboot once a year whether you need to or not,
or (b) run a background process to see if the background process is still
running." We're not spending any money on (a), so I guess it's (b).

Now I need a PHB dashboard for "someone" to check every 5 minutes to see if
the background process that checks the background process is still running.

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noonespecial
Reboot once a year!? Who has time for that! I've got a few redhat boxes that
just celebrated 900 days!

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jfoutz
Doesn't that worry you a bit? I remember amazon having trouble re starting
machines that had been up for several years. I think they ran into several
problems. Boot sector demagnetization was one. I think they had problems with
drives that could spin, but failed in such a way they couldn't start spinning.

Really, you should _consider_ power cycling every 90 days or so, just to make
sure you can restart. at least use several different brands of HD in your raid
arrays.

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noonespecial
Yeah, that is good advice. I'd do it if I cared at all about what was on them.
They're just part of the "long tail" of hardware, long migrated off of. Now we
just let them run for the novelty of saying, "look its been up for YEARS!" One
does a webcam of the server room.

As a side note, every single production server we now use is a vmware
instance... how do you count uptime there as it gets passed around various
physical machines?

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icky
Ad-hoc robotics! :-D

