OT: RE: Looking for some upgrade advice

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, May 19, 2006, John Esak wrote:
>>
>> I suspect the only reason I haven't seen comparable uptimes on my linux
>> systems is because the kernel updates require a reboot.  I talked directly
>> to the 2nd in charge of the kernel, as well as some of the other kernel
>> devs, and the consensus was that if I wanted a hot-swappable kernel, I
>> could go and write the hot-swap code myself.  They didn't consider it a
>> priority, or even desirable.
>
>As you know, the *last* thing in the world I want to do is start a Linux
>thread here. :-)
>
>BUT... this is something I hadn't considered in our upcoming major move to
>SuSe Linux. We have a situation where the main *nix server (currently SCO
>OpenServer 5.6) can NOT go down at all. Literally, it is used to produce
>various things, mostly bar code lables 365/24/7... with absolutely NO down
>time at all except for two week long vacations during the year and some
>other extremely special circumstances... hardly would I called these
>"planned maintenance"... mor like get in whatever we can because the system
>went down for some unforeseen reason! :-)  Very occasionally, and I mean
>very occasionally, we can stop the constant transactional postings (and
>label printing) for a few minutes... rally, just a few. Otherwise, it
>becomes much like the "I Love Lucy" chocolate factory conveyor belt scene.
>
>What, seriously, are we going to do in this situation. I was kin of hoping
>we could find a *stable* Linux... meaning a kernel that does not need that
>much or *any* patching. Are you talking about real security problems, or
>feature upgrades? We simply can not bring the mahcine down for either
>reason... at least not on *any* kind of ongoing basis.... how in the world
>does *anyone* cope with such a situation.

I suspect that the vast majority of kernel updates are for features, not
security issues.  I've seen very few kernel level exploits, most of which I
think required local access to the machine.  Assuming that your critical
server is internal and not directly exposed to the Internet, this wouldn't
worry me.

The SLES9 Service Pack 3 has several kernal updates, but the reason it's
critical for us here is that it supports newer CPUs and SATA, and it's
getting difficult to get 32-bit processors.

We just retired a Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 machine running on a Pentium 75
that had been doing our dialup uucp, HylaFAX, and mail services for dozens
of domains.  It was running a 2.0.35 kernel.  I'm in the process of
replacing a Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 machine with a 350MhZ PII which was our
primary incoming mail server, usenet news, etc., etc. machine since 2000 or
so.  We have several SuSE 9.0 Professional systems in production, and I
don't see replacing or updating their kernels (the server software is the
OpenPKG version so that's all current).

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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To say that UNIX is doomed is pretty rabid, OS/2 will certainly play a role,
but you don't build a hundred million instructions per second multiprocessor
micro and then try to run it on OS/2.  I mean, get serious.
		-- William Zachmann, International Data Corp