[Ti] Software Update everybody

[Chris Olson]

On Friday, February 14, 2003, at 09:03 PM, Mike Stanley wrote:
> But you aren't running OS X Server on your Ti, are you?  If Apple 
> wants to compete head-to-head in the enterprise space, then yeah, they 
> ought to try to deliver the kind of behavior you're looking for.

No, I was just using it as an example.

> But you're not *just* running BSD on that TiBook and I think it is 
> unrealistic for you to expect the same kind of experience you've had 
> in the Unix world.  If you want to be able to patch your system and 
> not reboot, you surely could accomplish that with a PPC variant of 
> Linux, right?  :)

Right.  Two of our mail servers are running Debian PPC on PowerMac 
9600's and neither of them has been rebooted for over a year.  Both of 
them have had software upgrades, as they become available from 
security.debian.org, on an average of every three or four weeks.

> If not, why be surprised (or bothered) that you have to reboot when 
> you patch OS X?

Because it irritates me.  I don't like rebooting computers.  If it was 
up to me, my TiBook would have an uptime of a year+ because I simply 
don't like to shut computers off :-)

> As far as running OS X Server on servers - I couldn't do it either - 
> especially couldn't until they began offering a bundled hardware RAID 
> solution.  Now that the XRaid is out I could consider it 
> hardware-wise, but I'll have to see some performance and reliability 
> reviews from people who run *real* production systems before I take a 
> chance on it.

We still use Solaris to do the heavy lifting, and a mix of HP-UX, 
Linux, and FreeBSD for light duty, and I can't really complain about 
either the cost or reliability record of Solaris, so it will continue 
to be used for the foreseeable future.  Most of our clients are 
Windows, but Windows has hit a brick wall in our enterprise with 
license 6, and none of the Win clients will be upgraded - they will be 
replaced with Macs as they die.  Apple's XServe and OS X Server are 
looking attractive, especially when we start adding more Mac clients to 
the network.  But I need servers that run, and continue to run, through 
upgrades, hardware failures, high tides, weird planetary alignments, or 
whatever else gets thrown at them.  I cannot afford to run systems that 
have to be rebooted just to swap out some software on the system with a 
newer version.  I don't mind rebooting once or twice every couple of 
years to replace a kernel, but it appears OS X has to be rebooted to 
even install a security upgrade, and I can't see where that is 
necessary.
--
Chris Olson
Administrator
AST Communications,  Inc.
Barron,  WI   USA