6 ms·

Rebooting is for Windows

30 points by aoos 16y ago

nailer 16y ago
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.
tedunangst 16y ago
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.
kgo 16y ago
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 16y ago
  I have run into problems where the machine would not survive reboot after updates but did not find this out after months.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      > 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.
      - sliverstorm 16y ago
        > the BSD systems are quite impressive in that regard, especially OpenBSD From my experience with OpenBSD, this appears to be quite simply because things have been pruned so well, there's nothing to fail. What is there is well-designed, and IIRC my general purpose install was ~200MB. The insanely lightweight and simple nature of OpenBSD is one of my favorite things about it, and probably one of the biggest contributing factors to its strengths.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        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.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  And that's one point for specialized hardware. On a zSeries mainframe, CPU errors are detected on-the-fly, faulty CPUs are deactivated and their processes migrated to functioning CPUs. They cost a lot, but they deliver a lot of confidence too.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Eventually parachutes need to be used. Now, they should work and save you, but why risk it if you don't have to?
  - blueben 16y ago
    Because if you don't exercise that functionality, you will never have confidence that it will work when you need it to.
    - timthorn 16y ago
      Worse - you might have false confidence that it will work, but you find out at the worst possible moment that it won't.
pavs 16y ago
One of the comment refers to netcraft for example of long Linux uptimes. According to http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html 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 16y ago
  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.
  - pavs 16y ago
    Actually I was thinking more in terms of web-server or any application server that is not tied to the OS. I am guessing you can't host Exchange server on Linux even if you wanted to. So that advantage would't really be an advantage. Its more like you don't have any option but to use Windows server.
  - slantyyz 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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).
- slantyyz 16y ago
  what advantages does MSFT have as a server OS? I would say support for enterprise apps. A lot of enterprise software vendors still target their development for Windows, and don't support Linux well or fail to test with Linux.
gmlk 16y ago
Well, that is at least one of the advantages of Common Lisp… ;)
ajg1977 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
    - vog 16y ago
      > 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. This is actually a feature, because it makes secure temp files possible. > I still pipe logs to a separate process that ... Note that logging is usually done in a separate process anyway, using the Syslog facility.
    - cparedes 16y ago
      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
runjake 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/IFSKit/ifskit_about.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/IFSKit/ifskit_about.m... http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ http://www.osr.com/seminars.html http://www.osr.com/seminars.html
    - sprout 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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.
jsz0 16y ago
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.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
InclinedPlane 16y ago
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.

30 points by aoos 16y ago

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.

tedunangst 16y ago

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.

kgo 16y ago

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 16y ago
I have run into problems where the machine would not survive reboot after updates but did not find this out after months.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    > 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.
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      > the BSD systems are quite impressive in that regard, especially OpenBSD From my experience with OpenBSD, this appears to be quite simply because things have been pruned so well, there's nothing to fail. What is there is well-designed, and IIRC my general purpose install was ~200MB. The insanely lightweight and simple nature of OpenBSD is one of my favorite things about it, and probably one of the biggest contributing factors to its strengths.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      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.
rbanffy 16y ago
And that's one point for specialized hardware. On a zSeries mainframe, CPU errors are detected on-the-fly, faulty CPUs are deactivated and their processes migrated to functioning CPUs. They cost a lot, but they deliver a lot of confidence too.
sliverstorm 16y ago
Eventually parachutes need to be used. Now, they should work and save you, but why risk it if you don't have to?
- blueben 16y ago
  Because if you don't exercise that functionality, you will never have confidence that it will work when you need it to.
  - timthorn 16y ago
    Worse - you might have false confidence that it will work, but you find out at the worst possible moment that it won't.

pavs 16y ago

One of the comment refers to netcraft for example of long Linux uptimes. According to http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html 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 16y ago
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.
- pavs 16y ago
  Actually I was thinking more in terms of web-server or any application server that is not tied to the OS. I am guessing you can't host Exchange server on Linux even if you wanted to. So that advantage would't really be an advantage. Its more like you don't have any option but to use Windows server.
- slantyyz 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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).
slantyyz 16y ago
what advantages does MSFT have as a server OS? I would say support for enterprise apps. A lot of enterprise software vendors still target their development for Windows, and don't support Linux well or fail to test with Linux.

gmlk 16y ago

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

ajg1977 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
  - vog 16y ago
    > 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. This is actually a feature, because it makes secure temp files possible. > I still pipe logs to a separate process that ... Note that logging is usually done in a separate process anyway, using the Syslog facility.
  - cparedes 16y ago
    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

runjake 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/IFSKit/ifskit_about.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/IFSKit/ifskit_about.m... http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ http://www.osr.com/seminars.html http://www.osr.com/seminars.html
  - sprout 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.

jsz0 16y ago

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.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

InclinedPlane 16y ago

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.