[ale] uptime, cool--New topic, keeping power on

[Mark Wright]

Thats really interesting.  Most of my experience has been with  
mainframe equipment.  Some of my customers have large server farms  
but I don't have any business with them.  I did pretend to be a sys  
admin for a private school once but that was all low end desktop  
hardware except for two dell desktop servers running DNS and Ex-  
cough, cough-- change.  We turned them on and off everyday.  I  
couldn't say if we had more or less HD or PS fallout than if we never  
powered them off.

I have two "real"  1U servers and 4 or 5 desktop PC's at home that  
stay up all the time.  They are all on cheap no name battery backup  
units that I bought where ever I could get a deal.  They let me ride  
out any power spike or four or five minute drop.  Out here in  
Woodstock we have not had the power go out fro more than a minute in  
many years.

I'd like to get a UPS that my linux boxes could talk to.  I would not  
have to worry about them if I were not at home.

Mark


On Sep 3, 2006, at 4:26 PM, Dow Hurst wrote:

> Mark,
> We keep all our machine on 24/7 since people log in and out using the
> workstations as compute nodes.  We keep everything on a UPS of some  
> kind
> to smooth the power and minimize down time.  Typically it is only  
> kernel
> related security updates that require a reboot.  I have ~55  
> machines of
> varying OS GNU/Linux versions I admin and none require regular  
> reboots.
> Your biggest problem with not rebooting is disk related aging for  
> lower
> quality disk drives.  Your biggest caveat with rebooting is amperage
> overload on the circuitry.  You do have to balance power protection  
> and
> power costs if your going to keep stuff on all the time.
>
> APC UPSes are supported well by the apcupsd package.  The machine can
> know what the UPS is doing and respond to power outages monitored  
> by the
> apcupsd daemon.  If you have a less well supported brand the  
> package NUT
> is designed to work with any UPS.  I've heard that New York city has
> such good power in Manhattan that only voltage regulation is  
> needed.  I
> don't know how true that is but a large research cluster ~250CPUs was
> installed at Cornell with only voltage regulators of high quality.
> Maybe a UPS was used on the NFS file server.
> Best wishes,
> Dow
>
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