Re: [tlug] Chasing the GHOST in my machine

[Edmund Edgar <lists@example.com>]

On 30 January 2015 at 15:13, Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com> wrote:
> My problem is that I administer servers that I rarely have a chance to
> reboot -- about once a year.  People are running processes that can
> run for weeks or months at a time.  A proposal to reboot is usually
> met with groans.  :-)  Does anyone know, under Ubuntu and using
> aptitude or apt-get, how I can update only those packages that do not
> require a reboot?  Or if it's bad to upgrade everything and ignore the
> suggestion to reboot for weeks or months?

I'd also be interested to hear opinions on this but for non-critical
things on boxes I can't easily reboot I tend to merrily update
anything that shows up, and leave the reboot to a time when I can
reasonably schedule it (which like you is often quite a long time).
I've never knowingly seen anything actually break as a result of doing
this - you just don't get the benefit of the update on long-running
processes unless you restart them. What I do tend to do is to manually
restart critical services after any update that might conceivably
affect it, not least to prove that they still do restart, since if
they were going to fail for some weird reason I'd rather have them
fail while I'm watching them than while I'm snowboarding.

I guess there are two obvious downsides to this compared to holding
back on the update until you can reboot:
1) You risk things breaking in some interesting way that hadn't been
tested because nobody expected you to be running that combination of
versions simultaneously.
2) When you finally do the reboot, it's harder to track down the
source of the problem in the event that something goes wrong, because
it could be related to some update you did ages ago.
...but to me this seems like an acceptable risk to take for most
situations compared to holding back on security updates.

-- 
-- 
Edmund Edgar
Founder, Social Minds Inc (KK)
Twitter: @edmundedgar
Linked In: edmundedgar
Skype: edmundedgar
http://www.socialminds.jp

Reality Keys
@realitykeys
support@example.com
https://www.realitykeys.com