Routine server reboots? When to schedule???

94jedi

Hey all, so as some of you know, I work for a small-ish A&E firm. We have 5 offices w/ about 110 employees total.

Sites 1 (60) and 2 (25) comprise about 85 of the 110 employees w/ the rest scattered between the remaining 3 sites.

Site 1 and site 2 have the majority of the servers. The other 3 sites each have file/print/DC's all in one box, all running Win2k3.

What I'm wondering is if any of you have a planned routine reboot maintenance day. We sometimes go months without rebooting our servers and I think it's a good idea to do so on occasion.

Do you all do it monthly? Quarterly? While I think monthly is too often, Quarterly may not be enough. I'm thinking maybe every other month.

Thoughts?

msteinhilber

When no users (or the least amount of users if you have people working 24/7) will be affected by the reboot as well as when there are no scheduled tasks that would be interrupted by a reboot. We never reboot our servers for the heck of it though, they are only rebooted when the need arises such as updates which require a reboot, upgrades, troubleshooting, etc.

tiersten

What msteinhilber said. Assuming everything is configured properly and your services don't have any stupid bugs like memory leaks, you shouldn't need to reboot your servers just because its been a while since the last reboot. If you did need to reboot it for some reason then out of hours scheduled maintenance time is usually when it is done.

94jedi

Gotcha. Thanks guys. This is why I asked the question. I want to see how my peers deal with things.

Thansk for the replies.

jibbajabba

Technically you should reboot your server after the second Tuesday of the month

ASSUMING you keep your (Windows) server up 2 date (where rarely windows updates don't need a reboot)

Daniel333

We do ESX and Linux ones quarterly. I don't agree with this, but it's what was decided above me, don't get me started

Windows machines are done monthly with patch maintenace except for terminal/Citrix servers which are done nightly or weekly depending on the client.

Some old NT4 boxes are done nightly since they are bit unstable. But that's the only notable exception.

tiersten

Daniel333 wrote: »

Some old NT4 boxes are done nightly since they are bit unstable. But that's the only notable exception.

Eww NT 4. We removed the last NT 4 box a year or two ago because the auditors kept freaking out about it. I managed to transfer the unsupported legacy app off it and put it onto a Win 2K3 server box instead.

94jedi

Daniel333 wrote: »

We do ESX and Linux ones quarterly. I don't agree with this, but it's what was decided above me, don't get me started

Windows machines are done monthly with patch maintenace except for terminal/Citrix servers which are done nightly or weekly depending on the client.

Some old NT4 boxes are done nightly since they are bit unstable. But that's the only notable exception.

hmmm...so you guys do a monthly maintenance w/ your Server 2k3 boxes???

tiersten

94jedi wrote: »

hmmm...so you guys do a monthly maintenance w/ your Server 2k3 boxes???

Microsoft release patches every month so if you want to keep up to date then sure. You don't just reboot it because you've not rebooted it in a while tho.

bwcarty

tiersten wrote: »

Microsoft release patches every month so if you want to keep up to date then sure. You don't just reboot it because you've not rebooted it in a while tho.

+1

We patch/reboot monthly except when MS releases an out of band security patch.

94jedi

tiersten wrote: »

Microsoft release patches every month so if you want to keep up to date then sure. You don't just reboot it because you've not rebooted it in a while tho.

Well, of course. I realize that the reboot just to reboot notion is silly but it does make sense to reboot in conjunction w/ MS patches.

rsutton

I only reboot a server when I have to which ussually is for an update. I was dealing with a problem a while back that required me to reboot our Citrix server daily. When I was doing that I did it early in the morning and I would make sure noone was connected. I now have a new Citrix server that doesn't require daily reboots.

tiersten

Unless its a major security patch which should have been applied last week if it hadn't only just been released today, we usually apply it to the test systems first and see if its okay. We've had patches which did weird things.

blargoe

We have a set weekend every month to patch/reboot

Forsaken_GA

We don't reboot a box unless we absolutely have to, which is no big deal, since we run mostly Debian machines. Most of our software upgrades are done in place with no reboot required.

As I'm sure some others can attest, rebooting a box that hasn't been booted in awhile isn't always a good idea. You never know if it will actually come back up. Whenever we have to reboot a box with 900+ days of uptime, it's a hold your breath kind of thing

94jedi

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

As I'm sure some others can attest, rebooting a box that hasn't been booted in awhile isn't always a good idea. You never know if it will actually come back up. Whenever we have to reboot a box with 900+ days of uptime, it's a hold your breath kind of thing

Definitely, I always hold my breath lol.

Jordus

Not unless you have to, but you still need to keep patches installed on time.

There are certain servers that you want to avoid restarting as much as you can, such as DNS servers (reboot **** the cache)