Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX

When in doubt, reboot? Not Unix boxes

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bedouin:
http://www.infoworld.com/t/unix/when-in-doubt-reboot-not-unix-boxes-061

Lead Head:
I'm going to have to agree. I've had to restart this particular install of XP more than once already because it started acting weird for no reason. Especially after updates.

Where as my Ubuntu box in the other room never seems to care. If something starts acting weird for no reason with it, a reboot usually does not fix it. I'll have to actually dig and find the issue, rather than just hope a reboot fixes it like in Windows.

That being said, I have had times where that Ubuntu box just started doing crazy things, and a reboot magically fixed everything. I've also had Windows installs with 60+ days of uptime without encountering a single issue either.

bedouin:
It's funny that I posted this article yesterday.  A few days ago VLC brought OS X to a crawl; I figured it was a memory leak and rebooted.  While I was right, it still didn't solve the problem because it happened again this morning.  This time I Googled 'vlc slow mac' and found a solution.  In Linux I would scour the logs to fix a problem, but in OS X -- I just became lazy said, "It's not a server, who cares.  Reboot it."

But really the same rules apply.  I don't know much about Windows' log files, but I'm guessing they're not easy to find and humanly read like with Unix-like systems. That could be another reason reboots are so frequent in Windows.  Since Linux is so modular it's very easy to figure out what's wrong.

That said, a misconfigured X server can lock up a Linux box very easily in my experience, beyond even getting back to console.

Lead Head:
Heh, I managed to screw up X trying to get the ATI drivers to play nicely with my Ubuntu install, that midway through bootup, video output would just completely turn off and the monitor would go into stand by. That was a real head scratcher.

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