On Sat, 17 Sep 2011 07:13:26 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 9/16/2011 21:36, Jim Henderson wrote:
>  > Linux is a kernel.  I'm not making assumptions about the kernel.
> 
> Incidentally, in the real world, nobody cares about the kernel. If you
> have 10,000 airline agents hitting your database from all around the
> world, and your database server takes 10 minutes to restart and recache
> its indexes after you upgrade the code, nobody really cares if the
> kernel survived the upgrade or not. :-)  That's what always amuses me
> about such discussions.

Certainly - and the question of whether it has to be rebooted or not is 
somewhat mooted by that point.  I can get a lot of things to restart 
properly by just going to single user mode and back to runlevel 3 or 5, 
but if services are offline, that's still downtime.

Server uptime isn't a great measure of availability.  Service uptime is 
more meaningful.

Just like the neverending debate about which Linux desktop environment is 
the "best".  I've used pretty much all of them, and have come to the 
conclusion that the DE is pretty irrelevant - if I am using a computer, 
I'm using it for the apps, not the DE.  If I'm focused on the DE so much 
that I "hate" KDE or GNOME or LXDE or whatever - then I'm obviously not 
using the computer as a tool to get actual work done.

> Indeed, people don't really even care if it was the database down or the
> router provided by your ISP.  A backhoe outside your door is going to
> screw up your uptime stats as much as a kernel upgrade will.

Absolutely.

Jim

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