Hello fellow nixers,
In this thread we'll discuss an old myth that we've actually never brought as a discussion on the forums yet: To reboot or not to reboot.

It is often said that rebooting to solve an issue is the equivalent of giving up. It might be the norm on some other operating systems but on Unix-like OS with users that should intimately know their machine it's regarded as heresy.

having a high uptime is looked at as an epic tale. A show off of stability and rigidness.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/0...-of-uptime
https://web.archive.org/web/201806232200...cs/uptimes
https://www.infoworld.com/article/262344...boxes.html



There's even a command uprecords for keeping track of reliability.

However, sometimes, especially when the machine runs as a development one and not a server, it seems mandatory to reboot. Let's say for a kernel upgrade or full system upgrade. Or init system upgrade. Or hardware upgrade. Or even in some cases some kernel modules update (if the system doesn't have a dynamic way to load those).

Still even when updating the kernel some OS, for example Linux, allow to update/patch the kernel without rebooting via features such as kexec.

So here we go:
Nixers, what's your opinion on this topic of rebooting. Do you reboot often, on which type of machines. Do you have any special tricks, any story to share about a time you rebooted and it was worthless, or a time when you actually never found out why the issue was happening in the first place.

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My take on the topic. I usually avoid rebooting unless there's a kernel update. I have uptimes going around a 100 days in a row.
On my server I actually almost never reboot.

So on both of my two servers I haven't rebooted in around a year.

When the service is running fine I think there's not much to worry about unless there's an important security update to do on the kernel.

I reboot most often, on my home machine and work dev machine, when I run into the kind of issues that make me pull my hair off and after trying everything else and that didn't work.

My latest story was about a card reader that wasn't being recognized by the official proprietary driver. For those who have no clue about card readers on Unix, they work through a daemon called pcscd that will match the appropriate driver (/usr/lib/pcsc/drivers/ for instance) depending on the device vendor ID and product ID. There are some drivers that are open that can come from the package manager or along with other tools such as opensc.
In all cases, the reader I wanted to try wasn't recognized by pcscd even after following all I thought was right. So I gave up, thought something might have been messed up in udev or something that I didn't caught.

But still after rebooting there was nothing.
Oh no the uptime went away!

Digging further in the issue. Checking dmesg for the venderID and productID that was being reported and trying to match it with the Info.plist that should contain what points to the proprietary driver, I found out that the IDs aren't even listed. I tried adding them but in vain, the driver doesn't support the device. Apparently they forgot to update their Linux driver.

So I ended up using another card reader (acr38) that's widely supported.

Reboot lesson learned.

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So what do you think about rebooting and how frequently it should be done.