Monday 7 October 2013

Why You Can't Reboot My Server

When I was an on-site server engineer in 1997, I stood next to a HP 9000 engineer waiting for a SCSI hard drive at our parts depot, and we got chatting about his next work order: He was off to install a tape drive. I asked him what the new hard drive had to do with it, and he mentioned that the server in question had been running continuously for over seven years, and at least one drive was likely to get stuck and refuse to spin again once he turned the frame back on.

I found this remarkable at the time, and couldn't imagine a Windows server lasting that long. I have moved on, and frankly expect my Windows servers to survive that long today. Very few share this position, and I'm trying to find out why it's so lonely on this side of the fence.

In this series of posts, I'll be looking at the most common complaints from Windows engineers and administrators they feel are adequate to justify rebooting servers, either as (or instead of) a diagnostic step, on a schedule that can best be described as arbitrary, or even artificially to apply fixes for problems the system doesn't have.

In this series:
Part 1: But I Have to Reboot My Own Windows System All the Time!
Part 2. Windows Just Isn't That Stable
Part 3. Console Applications, Java, Batch Files and Other Red Herrings 
Part 4. Windows Updates and File Locking 
Part 5. Nobody Ever Runs a Server That Long
Part 6. It's OK, the Resilient Partner Can Take Over
Part 7. I Don't Think You Understand What A Server Is


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