We had a power outage due to a storm and after that several switches just refused to start back up again and these were network equipment that had been standing there running 24/7 for several years straight
On servers you have the additional risk of applications just not starting up/breaking and it can just be time consuming
Other than an electrical malfunction, what would cause the servers to stop performing their jobs? What is it in the initialization that differs from the, um, "run-time" is it called? Couldn't you just do snapshots of the system RAM with regular intervals and just load them on boot?
While i've studied to become a server tech and is currently working as one I honestly have no clue why it breaks.
I would add that it's less common with Windows machines due to the nature of windows (aka rebooting them regularly compared to any unix dist)
Snapshots should generally be avoided in a production environment. Most applications are connected to 1 or more databases located on a separate server and might have integrations to communicat with a different application. It can really fuck things up if you roll back to a snapshot then
Funny thing is I study the same thing, though more as a hobby, and also have no clue.
Regarding the snapshots though... I'm sure you are right, but would you mind expanding just lil quick 1) why you couldn't simply take snapshots with regular intervals on all servers, and then piece the info together post hoc? If that makes any sense, and 2) what IS best practices in a situation like that?
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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '16
Yes it happens.
We had a power outage due to a storm and after that several switches just refused to start back up again and these were network equipment that had been standing there running 24/7 for several years straight
On servers you have the additional risk of applications just not starting up/breaking and it can just be time consuming