7 ms·

The interesting part is that it occurred to no one to just reboot and see if that fixes it. Apparently systems were a lot stabler.

kristopolous 3y ago
Calling IT is the right move here. Could have been an intruder or a remote user doing something important. It's a different relationship. The department workstations were much closer to the refrigerator or copy machine. If it's broken you don't touch it and just call somebody. In modern money these machines were between $7,000-$10,000 each depending on configuration. To put it in context, pretend you work somewhere where they provide you with a half height rack and a Precision 7960 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-certified/precision-7960-rack-workstation/spd/precision-r7960-workstation/xctopr7960us_vp?configurationid=7df7c9ea-6084-4db8-824a-2a176f306ab8 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-certified/p... And it starts acting up. What do you do? (As an aside, I've always wondered how many maxed out configuration orders they get - you know, when you kick that price up to $100k - what's the threshold where they ask if they could put someone on a plane to visit you? 10 of them?)
- eru 3y ago
  I'd probably reboot it every day (or every week) as a matter of course. Not just when there are problems. Just so that I know that there are no unexpected surprises happening when I need to reboot it in an emergency.
  - aflag 3y ago
    That sounds needlessly disruptive. It is a workstation after all. I restart mine as little as I'm allowed to and once a month sounds way too much already.
    - dmbche 3y ago
      What is the negative?
      - computerfriend 3y ago
        Downtime.
      - aflag 3y ago
        You have to close all windows (and possibly tabs in your editor), restart long running jobs you have in the background, restart your SSH sessions, lose your undo tree, lose all the variables you have loaded in your interpreter or bash, among others that I have possibly forgotten. All recoverable, but annoying. I can't imagine doing that every day. It's fine for a home computer, but for a workstation, I just want it always on. Though these days even my personal laptop is essentially always on.
        eru 3y ago
        For a personal machine, it's fine to leave it always on. > All recoverable, but annoying. For a machine that other people are supposed to rely upon, I'd rather exercise this recovery you are talking about regularly. So I know it works, when I need it. For a production system, I rather live through it's first day of uptime 10,000 days in a row, than making new uptime records every day. In production, you don't want to do anything for the first time, if you can avoid it.
        aflag 3y ago
        For production it's highly dependent on the business needs. But restarting the entire estate every day seems a big enough hit to capacity at the very least that may already be prohibitive without any further consideration. Not to count that would require every service to be prepared to be restarted daily, which could require a more complex system than you'd need otherwise.
        eru 3y ago
        I'd want to restart individual components often, probably not the whole system at once. Basically, whatever eg Google is doing.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Somewhat against UNIX culture. There used to be proudness in having very high system uptimes. The modern security arms race has basically killed that.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Not sure it's just security. I wonder if it's also that people don't host important services on non-redundant machines as much anymore.
    - somat 3y ago
      I don't think that long uptimes is unix culture at all. unix was always about being small, simple and fun to use, A place where having something now is much more valuable than being correct later. A hackers OS. This is also where most of the sins of unix come from. "We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic(), and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'" https://multicians.org/unix.html https://multicians.org/unix.html
- TristanBall 3y ago
  I'd guess orders for these probably skew to the higher end. If you're putting workstations in racks it's either to share them, or due for power/cooling/noise reasons, and the fact that you've got a workload that justifies having those kind of problems probably means all your other costs will still dwarf hardware. There's usually a large premium on whatever the current largest size dimms, ssds and the top 10% or so of cpus and video cards. So I expect they sell a lot of machines that are "50%" size ( either max physical capacity with 50% size components, or half physical capacity, with 90-100% components ), and a fair number of maxed out just because it will often be cheaper to have 1 maxed out option then 3 smaller ones, and budgets don't matter except they do. Places who cost engineering time at $100k/hour won't blink at $100k computers if it gets the job done.
tmn007 3y ago
Hard reboot on those old Sun systems usually meant a dirty filesystem and telling off by the admin as they needed an fsck
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  No matter how many times I see it I always read fsck as "(for) fucks sake" and then internally correct to "file system check." I think I've got a flashbulb stressful memory floating around in there.

kristopolous 3y ago

Calling IT is the right move here. Could have been an intruder or a remote user doing something important. It's a different relationship. The department workstations were much closer to the refrigerator or copy machine. If it's broken you don't touch it and just call somebody. In modern money these machines were between $7,000-$10,000 each depending on configuration. To put it in context, pretend you work somewhere where they provide you with a half height rack and a Precision 7960 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-certified/precision-7960-rack-workstation/spd/precision-r7960-workstation/xctopr7960us_vp?configurationid=7df7c9ea-6084-4db8-824a-2a176f306ab8 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-certified/p... And it starts acting up. What do you do? (As an aside, I've always wondered how many maxed out configuration orders they get - you know, when you kick that price up to $100k - what's the threshold where they ask if they could put someone on a plane to visit you? 10 of them?)

eru 3y ago
I'd probably reboot it every day (or every week) as a matter of course. Not just when there are problems. Just so that I know that there are no unexpected surprises happening when I need to reboot it in an emergency.
- aflag 3y ago
  That sounds needlessly disruptive. It is a workstation after all. I restart mine as little as I'm allowed to and once a month sounds way too much already.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    What is the negative?
    - computerfriend 3y ago
      Downtime.
    - aflag 3y ago
      You have to close all windows (and possibly tabs in your editor), restart long running jobs you have in the background, restart your SSH sessions, lose your undo tree, lose all the variables you have loaded in your interpreter or bash, among others that I have possibly forgotten. All recoverable, but annoying. I can't imagine doing that every day. It's fine for a home computer, but for a workstation, I just want it always on. Though these days even my personal laptop is essentially always on.
      - eru 3y ago
        For a personal machine, it's fine to leave it always on. > All recoverable, but annoying. For a machine that other people are supposed to rely upon, I'd rather exercise this recovery you are talking about regularly. So I know it works, when I need it. For a production system, I rather live through it's first day of uptime 10,000 days in a row, than making new uptime records every day. In production, you don't want to do anything for the first time, if you can avoid it.
        aflag 3y ago
        For production it's highly dependent on the business needs. But restarting the entire estate every day seems a big enough hit to capacity at the very least that may already be prohibitive without any further consideration. Not to count that would require every service to be prepared to be restarted daily, which could require a more complex system than you'd need otherwise.
        eru 3y ago
        I'd want to restart individual components often, probably not the whole system at once. Basically, whatever eg Google is doing.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Somewhat against UNIX culture. There used to be proudness in having very high system uptimes. The modern security arms race has basically killed that.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Not sure it's just security. I wonder if it's also that people don't host important services on non-redundant machines as much anymore.
  - somat 3y ago
    I don't think that long uptimes is unix culture at all. unix was always about being small, simple and fun to use, A place where having something now is much more valuable than being correct later. A hackers OS. This is also where most of the sins of unix come from. "We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic(), and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'" https://multicians.org/unix.html https://multicians.org/unix.html
TristanBall 3y ago
I'd guess orders for these probably skew to the higher end. If you're putting workstations in racks it's either to share them, or due for power/cooling/noise reasons, and the fact that you've got a workload that justifies having those kind of problems probably means all your other costs will still dwarf hardware. There's usually a large premium on whatever the current largest size dimms, ssds and the top 10% or so of cpus and video cards. So I expect they sell a lot of machines that are "50%" size ( either max physical capacity with 50% size components, or half physical capacity, with 90-100% components ), and a fair number of maxed out just because it will often be cheaper to have 1 maxed out option then 3 smaller ones, and budgets don't matter except they do. Places who cost engineering time at $100k/hour won't blink at $100k computers if it gets the job done.

tmn007 3y ago

Hard reboot on those old Sun systems usually meant a dirty filesystem and telling off by the admin as they needed an fsck

IggleSniggle 3y ago
No matter how many times I see it I always read fsck as "(for) fucks sake" and then internally correct to "file system check." I think I've got a flashbulb stressful memory floating around in there.