[WBEL-users] newbie - kernel and other upgrades questions

[Luke Scharf]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 09:39, Alon wrote:
> Would I be prompted for a Reboot?

No.  You reboot at your convenience.  In Unix, your tools do not boss
you around.  The price you pay for all of this power, though, is that
you have to know a few things about how the system works.

The vendor is punting the reboot-decision to you, since RHEL/WBEL is
intended for systems that will inconvenience a lot of people if they go
down.  There's no way that they can weigh the cost of downtime, so
they're not even going to try.  You are root, the system is your b*tch
-- and no one else's.  :-)

> To the best of my knowledge kernel updates usually involve a reboot. Is this 
> correct?

Completely correct.

Kernel updates are about the only software change that requires a reboot
in Linux.  Except for sshd, you have to manually restart services when
they are upgraded -- but instead of rebooting the system, you just run
"service somethingd restart".  The rationale is the one that I described
above.

When updating GUI and X11 software, it does seem like a good idea to log
out, press CTRL+ALT+Backspace.  Surprisingly, though, I've never had any
weirdness when I've failed to do this.

I hope this helps!

-Luke

P.S. One other thing that comes up that is sort of a normal-tangent from
this discussion is that there are almost no system-modal dialog boxes in
Unix GUIs.  The reasoning is that if a particular application that took
control of the whole screen, it will prevent you from handling
system-emergencies.

-- 
Luke Scharf, Systems Administrator
Virginia Tech Aerospace and Ocean Engineering