Rebooting Solaris

[ejmilne]

Hi,
Are there any system reasons why you would want to restart a solaris server on a daily basis?

Thanks,
Emma

 

[KenCunningham]

Not that I can think of. The wear and tear on components would be greatly increased by such a strategy. Of course, if the system is generating a lot of zombie processes, there might be an argument for it, but the long-term solution should be to investigate and eliminate the cause of such processes.

Has this been suggested where you are?

 

[ejmilne]

Its a new job, and has been put in place by previous sysadmins, I don't personally think it is a good idea, but no-one knows why it is in place!

 

[KenCunningham]

As I say, it's (IMHO) perhaps dangerous, but without knowing the background you're a little stymied. I'd put forward a case for turning off the daily reboot and see what happens. Presumably if it was necessary at one time, the 'problem' it's supposed to fix will manifest itself again. If not, you're saveing wear and tear as I mentioned above. Good luck.

 

[ejmilne]

I think I'll take the risk and suspend it, thanks for your help, much appreciated!!

 

[marrow]

I agree with Ken, I've worked on 100's of unix systems and I've never heard of a system being rebooted daily. Might be worth taking a look at the end of the day to see what's in the system. Run the following, perhaps there's a process taking up swap/temp space.
df -k; vmstat 2 10; prstat and/or prstat -s size; dmesg;