[Ti] Software Update everybody

[Glenn L. Austin]

on 2/14/2003 9:44 PM, Chris Olson at chris at mercury1.astcomm.net wrote:

> 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.

I guess it depends upon whether you're using a monolithic kernel or modules.
Linux uses modules, and in most cases can simply have the current module
replaced with the new module (although the process to do that it *somewhat*
complex).  However, some of the updates are done to the kernel itself, which
requires a restart to load the new kernel updates.  It seems that OS X uses
a monolithic kernel, so several of the updates that may not require
restarting on other systems would require a restart on OS X, since it was
the kernel itself that was updated (this is also, in my opinion, why the
updates are fairly large).

-- 
Glenn L. Austin <><
Computer Wizard and Race Car Driver
<glenn at austin-home.com>
<http://www.austin-home.com/glenn/>