How often should Linux OS Reboot or Restart?

Are there any pre-checks one can do to make sure a (running) server is bootable (and won't give errors)?

I'm still running CentOS 6 and the last time I updated the kernels, the system didn't boot anymore.
I had to resort to a snapshot I made just before the updates (which I always do), but I've become a little hesistant to blindly try this again now.
 
This was right after I rebooted the system after an update with Yum and Custombuild.
This was about 2.5 months ago.
More custombuild-updates have been installed since then, but no kernel-updates yet.
 

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Is this a VPS? You may not be able to do kernel updates on it.
 
This is a PXE boot from TransIP so you're actually booting the OS from their network...
 
This is a VPS indeed.
Been updating like this for a number of years.
This time it failed. Haven't tried it again.

That's why I asked if you can do a pre-check, a dry-boot for instance, to check if the system is bootable at all.

I wanted to upgrade the old CentOS anyway, but can't do this (easily) on my current VPS with DA-licensing and such, so I want to get another VPS, install a fresh CentOS and move all the accounts over.
 
BBM said:
That's why I asked if you can do a pre-check, a dry-boot for instance, to check if the system is bootable at all.
Click to expand...
Transip has solid VPS with snapshots, we had several VPS with them and never had problems with updating kernels
Did you contact Transip ?
 
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I was able to restore the VPS back with a snapshot I took a little earlier. So I didn't contact them.
I know TransIP's VPS are stable and trustworthy. Therefore I presumed it was an update-issue on my side.
 
Its likley because of the PXE boot,
It was a time ago but I dont recall a PXE boot on our VPS servers , something wrong with the boot order ?
 
Maybe it was an unfortunatly glitch during reboot that night. Not sure anymore if I tried rebooting a second time, but I think I did.
Normally, after kernel-updates, I reboot the VPS, and wait a minute for everything to come online again.
If it takes longer then I expected, I will look at the console-screen for possible errors. This error looked quite serious and I didn't want to waste my entire night looking into it, so I rolled back the snapshot first to see if that would fix things again, and it did.
 
Generally, there's no need. If you update an application program like Acroread or LibreOffice or Firefox, any running instances will be in RAM. Usually the update process preserves configuration files, installs the new version and deletes the old one. The next time you restart the program, you'll get the new version.

Regards,
J Wick
 
Johnharper said:
Generally, there's no need. If you update an application program like Acroread or LibreOffice or Firefox, any running instances will be in RAM. Usually the update process preserves configuration files, installs the new version and deletes the old one. The next time you restart the program, you'll get the new version.

Regards,
J Wick
Click to expand...

Thank you for your input into these forums. Consider we don't like spamming here, and all attempts to SPAM users will be result in a ban.

Please take your time and read what DirectAdmin is. Usually servers with DirectAdmin does not have Acroread or LibreOffice or Firefox running there at all.
 
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