I like having a consistent update and reboot schedule. Uptime feels overrated over stability and clearing the RAM occasionally.
I definitely have some Docker containers that randomly stop working, and they are more often consistently fixed by a reboot of the machine rather than a reboot of the container or the Docker service.
Not to mention the security implications of not rebooting after certain updates.
Are we not doing kernel upgrades?
Yeah that’s about the only time I have to do reboots at work which are 99% linux. Well the production ones anyway.
Or the other reason is my lab having power issues due to malfunctioning UPSes, faulty NEMA L6-30 plugs, janky 240v circuit breakers or… I’m beginning to think my lab is electrically cursed.
Was about to say, “or if you’re running Arch, the last time you updated the kernel or systemd version, so probably last week or summit.”
Pretty sure everybody is missing the joke. The joke is that Debian packages are so stable and stale that you likely will need a reboot before an update.
Also, it’s a joke…please patch your boxes, k?
I’ve got a patch in my boxers right now.
Oh boxes.
I got obsessed with uptime in the early 2000s, but for my desktop Slackware box. It ran a bunch of servers and services and crap but only for me, not heavy loads of public users. Anyway, I reached 6 years of uptime without a UPS and was aiming for 7 when a power outage got me.
Skill issue. Next time you can open up the computers power supply while it’s running, splice in a second power cable, and attach a UPS without powering down or getting electrocuted.
For legal reasons, /s
Not sure what your signature is supposed to do here but now I have 3rd degree burns and a fireball has engulfed my office wall
But more importantly, did your uptime get reset?
That’s ridiculous. It’s much more complicated than that.
You need to check NUT.
Deez? 🌰🐿️
- Uptime : up 2 weeks, 5 days, 2 hours, 7 minutes
Had to reboot due to Jellyfin weirdness, It’s not happened since so maybe it was patched whatever happened.
I had to reboot since i upgraded nvidea and jellyfin stopped transcoding.
They screwed up their upgrade script in the release around then. I spent an hour manually fixing it on my system. I’d imagine they sorted it with a point release shortly after but I haven’t checked.
Does NixOS apply kernel updates live? I can’t recall from when I used it.
Mine doesn’t. I reboot when I get a new kernel.
On my Gentoo server, uptime:
- 21:47:56 up 2455 days, 15:09, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
Solid.
Would have been double that by now if not for the fire.
You forgot to say “this is fine”, I take it?
Joking aside, I hope you didn’t lose anything. Was it a big fire?
Those who manage the dedicated server racks service kept my stuff intact. Thankfully. Just disrupted my uptime.
[User “error” since, has cost me a TB of data. “Error”, fearquoted, because it was intentional… probably unnecessary clearing of space, partly regretted since.]
I don’t know how big the fire was, happened over 1000 miles away from here.
So, it really was fine. :3
Heard of tuptime? I’ve been using it for a while now, I think I like it.
System startups: 151 since 18:00:05 10/11/15 System shutdowns: 137 ok + 13 bad System life: 9yr 223d 1h 27m 47s
Longest uptime: 106d 5h 34m 28s from 14:17:10 26/03/22 Average uptime: 23d 4h 32m 0s System uptime: 99.81% = 9yr 216d 12h 31m 51s
Longest downtime: 4d 23h 30m 48s from 10:36:53 14/09/23 Average downtime: 1h 2m 46s System downtime: 0.19% = 6d 12h 55m 56s
Current uptime: 25d 0h 34m 25s since 20:25:37 15/11/25
Does it work retrospectively?
Nope it creates a little database, which you could manualy edit I suppose.
it doesn’t appear to
Heard of it for the first time (as far as I can remember) a couple days ago, on Lemmy.
TIL, Lemmy’s educational.
I’ve got an OpenBSD based router with ~4 hours of battery backup. If I ever stopped futzing around with it, the uptime would be fairly close to when the last version update was. (They’ve got a release cadence of about 6 months).
Debian admin here. Even Debian gets regular kernel upgrades that like a reboot afterwards. Security updates are more important than uptime. Also regular testing for clean recovery after a reboot is a must so a power outrage doesn’t bring any new surprises with it. Also test your backup restores regularly.
As someone running a UPS on my ubuntu server, “uptime” represents the time since the last kernel release, and not much else.
Novice homelaber here, is this just a case of apt update & upgrade or is there different commands for security and kernel updates? Also what’s your preferred backup/restore software? Thanks!
Nope it’s just apt update & upgrade. Iirc apt tells you when the kernel was updated and needs a reboot as well.
full-upgrade probably a better pick
Is it? Afaik that also removes incompatible packages so if you’ve installed some custom stuff that might not be the best option.
Not if you use Proxmox! One has to be careful.
Only if you installed the package
needrestart
Also worth checking out restic. It’s more command line oriented and is generally stateless
I configured restic once, forget about it and saved my files because it was making backups since forever.
Oh, never heard about it. A quick research showed me that restic is a very viable solution. Thanks for mentioning it, I added it to my comment.
While researching, I also came across a fancy WebUI, which is mostly what non-CLI users want: backrest
Thanks just installed immich and I need a quality backup system.
I appreciate the link!
Kernel updates are usually held back and need to be selected manually. E.g. apt-get install linux-image-amd64.
I prefer rsync for private backups and employ bareos in my company for all servers.
I’m not the person you asked the question of. I’m a fellow novice homelaber.
I use Kopia to backup my data folders and Docker container data. Works really well. The project for this weekend is to set offsite backups to be uploaded to iDrive.
When I update I use this:
sudo apt update && \ sudo apt upgrade -y && \ sudo apt full-upgrade -y && \ flatpak update -y 2>/dev/null; \ sudo apt autoremove -y && \ sudo apt autoclean && \ sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=7dYou can get rid of upgrade if you also use full-upgrade
I think you can do
apt upgrade --updatenow.‘apt --upgrade -U’
Incredible that it’s not written everywhere, I always wanted to use something like this without the " update && upgrade" which looks like is not working oftentimes
Is it really not written? I saw apt upgrade --update and knew the standard shortcut would be -u, but that didn’t work so I tried -U, bingo bongo off I went.
WHAT. Does this do both sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade?
I think so. I read it a few months back, but I don’t use any apt based systems to check on.
see also –autoremove
Your note is very interesting about the difference between the commands and how autoremove will automatically remove stuff before or after the upgrade is performed. Should it always be done after, or are there instances when running it before is more beneficial? Is there any need to do both like this:
# sudo apt --update --autoremove upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove -yI can’t really imagine a benefit to
--autoremoveexcept for keeping old packages a bit longer before removing them.Eg, if you run
apt --update --autoremove upgrade -yonce a day you’ll keep your prior-to-currently-running-version kernel packages a day longer than if you ranautoremoveimmediately after each upgrade.To make things more confusing: the new-ish
apt full-upgradecommand seems to remove most of whatapt autoremovewants to… but not quite everything. 🤷
🤯
I haven’t had a kernel update on Debian that triggered the “you should restart” message in quite some time. I was under the understanding that most newer systems now use splicing at the kernel level to not require periodic reboots.
I haven’t seen it in a while either, but also, if there is a kernel update,
uname -salways returns the old kernel until a reboot.
What do you use for backup restores ?
The same tools.
Yeah, people that brag about uptimes are just bragging about the fragility of their infrastructure. If designed correctly you should be able to patch and reboot infrastructure while application availability stays up.
With an uptime of greater than 5 years I’m going to be concerned about the system potentially not coming back up after a reboot/power outage, especially for physical hardware
At a bank I worked at, we had an old IBM Power server which was at that point purely used for historical data. It had multiple years of uptime and was of course a good 10+ years old. When we went to take it offline, we actually just disabled the nic on the switch so we could reduce the number of powercycles it would see in fear that it would not power on anymore. Theoretically the data on it is purely historical, backed up and not needed, but there was enough question marks on each of those fronts we just played it safe
power outrage
New fear unlocked.
The sun was angry that day, my friend…
Even Debian gets regular kernel upgrades that like a reboot afterwards
Huh. Only 11 days on the Raspberry Pi I’m using as a “desktop system” right now. (Arch Linux Arm, btw… though Arch Linux Arm sucks now-a-days.)
Let’s check my RPi-based NAS:
[tootsweet@mynasserver ~]$ uptime 19:56:07 up 212 days, 18:43, 4 users, load average: 0.16, 0.04, 0.01Also not as long as I’d have guessed.
My RPi uptime on one project will never exceed 4 hours.
I’ve got a cron job set to reboot my Raspberry Pi every 4 hours because I wrote a crappy Python app that continuously creates objects during operation that I would have to recreate, but I can’t delete the originals, or rather, I can delete the original parent but the child survives and keeps its memory allocation. So a full reboot with autolaunch of the application on boot is my ugly janky workaround. Its a cosmetic application, nothing critical. Its just a colorful display of data metrics.
I can hear the horror and gnashing of teeth of real developers as they read this.
I’m a sysadmin and I’m weeping, gnashing my teeth and rending my garments. 😆 And I’ve never done anything janky like that. Ever.
Oh, there’s even more jank in this thing than the reboot workaround described above!
I have 3 windows displaying different metrics on this display powered by the RPi. Because of the animation of each metric rendered on the display, higher value metrics will consume more CPU. Since each is a separate process, the animation in the displays would be different for each window by without any modifications. So to make each of the 3 display’s animations operate at the same relative speed, I do a calculation of how the number of objects being displayed for the metric, then add an amount of invisible (well, black on black) objects to each window so to equal a fixed amount of the animation speed I want resulting in each window having the exact same number of objects and the animations move at the same speed.
This works surprisingly well. The only time I have to monkey with the fixed value is if I’m using it on faster or slower Raspberry Pis. For example, I’ll have a lower number of final fixed objects for an RPi 3 rather than a higher number of fixed final objects for a faster RPi 4.
As a real developer…
I just remember that airplanes have “reboot the plane every 51 days” to prevent an overflow from crashing the plane in their maintenance manuals
So, like, yours can be improved, but it’s not safety critical like other reboot requirements…
You just lack imagination. Some hikvision security cameras (the large, very expensive enterprisey ones) restart every couple of days due to “buildup of cosmic radiation”.
No matter how competent you are as a developer, there is no escaping cosmic radiation! 😉
Oh shit! Forget all that stuff I admitted to. My RPi reboots every 4 hours because … uh … cosmic radiation.
At some point when I am less busy again I think I am gonna swap back to a debian based system because my experience on arch and red hat systems just hasnt been as good (this may be because I started on Debian based systems and keep trying to use commands that dont work on the other ones out of muscle memory)
I get bored every so often and move all the important stuff to an external drive or a separate internal one and completely change my os
I am on manjaro but I have also run arch, red hat, void, mint, Debian, Ubuntu and a bunch of others that I either put on laptops or something similar as messing around with devices
Tails and slitaz have to be my favorite to run from a USB but peppermint isn’t the worst
I just did the contrary. Moved from debian to arch. After the update to trixie my network stack completely died somehow, so I’m going back to arch.
My father was an HPUX admin that had a server with an uptime of >12 years
I was introduced to homelab by trying to figure out how my uncles setup. It ran for 4 years after he died, 11 years uptime. The estate probate prevented anyone from touching the equipment for the legal fights, and I get a kick out of thinking of how smug he would have been about it.
mantotal erection time
Priapism isn’t a good thing.
Not much, time. What’s up with you?
