Re: [gentoo-user] system uptime

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> Technically, we should do a power down test every 6 months or so, but
> that turns out not to be a yes/no test in real life; it's a yes/destroy
> test and no-one wants to make a decision either way. So we all sit in
> limbo and wait for some exterior event to decide for us (like black-outs)
>

Half the time these are ancient services that have long been replaced
but nobody can bring themselves to make the call to get rid of the old
servers.  Maybe there were 10M records in the database and 9.998M of
them were migrated to a new database, but due to some issue the rest
couldn't be, so the old server stays up just in case anybody ever
needs the old data, and so on.

Typically these would just stick around until finally some hardware
component fails, and then it gets written off.

Sadly, this course of forcing hands seems to be going away.  At work
somebody tried to hand me an ancient system to look after in my spare
time.  Apparently they just finished virtualizing it.  Go figure -
they have VAX VMs available for Linux these days.  The problem is that
KT and maintaining documentation and not being the person who gets the
finger pointed at when something goes wrong costs the company time and
money, and in this case for almost zero value.

Usually the problems with technology aren't technical in nature...

-- 
Rich