Is it bad to keep my host machines to be on for like 3 months? With no down time?
What is the recommend? What do you do?
I had one Linux server that was up for over 500 days. It would have been up longer but I was organizing some cables and accidentally unplugged it.
Where I worked as a developer we had Sun Solaris servers as desktops to do my dev work on. I would just leave it on even during the weekends and vacations, it also had our backup webserver on it so we just let to run 100%. One day the sys admin said you may want to reboot your computer, it’s been over 600 days. 😆 I guess he didn’t have to reboot after patching all that time and I didn’t have any issues with it.
wait, they shut off? who knew.
Prod environments typically don’t have downtime. Save for patching every quarter that requires a host reboot.
Never.
Only when children break into the server room.
You can turn host machines off? Who knew.
Seriously, mine only get switched off if hardware breaks or needs reconfiguring.
Uptime is a score I need to beat!
Summer every day in the afternoon for heat and power usage (time of use bills triple from 3-9pm). Scripted to run on one host per site for must have apps.
Winter - once a month for the weekend after patch Tuesday. It’s a chance to check for cables being nibbled/cleaning/other things needing doing.
Only if I need to move it or upgrade the components, and that happens maybe once a year, if not less.
If it weren’t for that and power outages, they would have been on for 5+ years.
I don’t ever shut them down “just because why not”.
I have built a UPS with 200AH 12V battery with inverter charger for RV. It never fails with power so it runs like for months until I decided to put something in… let’s see
When do I shut down?
- When the power goes out and my UPS battery drains.
- When I do a hardware upgrade.
- If I want to rearrange equipment, and also when I moved this past summer.
That’s seriously about it.
I suppose it depends what kind of hardware you’re using. I have enterprise class servers that are meant to run 24/7 and they do. They’ll be useless technologically before they wear out.
I don’t shut them down but I restart when I apply updates. Having a high uptime counter is not a badge of honor unless it’s a fancy HA system.
You’re rebooting them for update right?
right?
I don’t reboot servers in my homelab unless any update require me to do so. I do have a clustered Proxmox setup, so no downtime if the admin (aka me) doesn’t screw up ;-)
The only valid reason (imho) to reboot unless any update requires it would be apps with memory leaks where a service restart doesn’t fix the problem. Not often I face this problem these days, but earlier versions of Windows had the occasional habit…