On 05/07/10 22:22, Merciadri Luca wrote:
Hi, When a computer stays turned on for a long amount of time, some problems could arise. I have the following questions: 1. What habitually makes a computer 'running Linux) go down (except electric problems)? 2. What are Debian/kernel's adaptations to prevent such problems from arising? Thanks.
I have had a Debian based server at home running 24/7 for about 7 or 8 years. Living near London, we seem to have a reasonably stable electricity supply (I don't do anything special) and I have had uptimes of nearly a year, with the only downtime in the year being when my wife made me turn it off as we went on holiday.
Of course upgrades to the kernel have required bringing it down, and more recently I have had several updgrades of hardware to increase disk space and increase performance with a faster processes so I could build in mythtv.
From November 2009 to 10 days ago I went through a phase of using a Sheeva plug computer as the server (in order to use less electricity), but I am sad to say its (hardware) reliability wasn't good and I have now abandoned that. Putting the old server back it has now been running 24/7 for the last 10 days.
It runs exim and apache and mythtv as the three key applications supported by both mysql and postgres, but it is also a git server, dns server (along with dhcp and tftp - using dnsmasq), time server, firewall/router/internet gateway and automatically supports most of the backups via cron (when it is master of the process) or via rsyncd (when it is the slave). I have never seen a memory leak or anything else that has required attention.
-- Alan Chandler http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk