Do we need this crap on LWN?

Do we need this crap on LWN?

Posted Feb 22, 2007 17:18 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Do we need this crap on LWN? by markc
Parent article: ESR's goodbye note

>> "RPM-based folks" are apparently missing out on a
>> lot of remote exploits and possible filesystem corruption!

>Some would argue it's not appropriate to have such file system checking
>built in to a package management system.

No; I was referring to the fact that you can't fsck a live filesystem, and that it's an unfortunate fact of life that filesystems are at best only as reliable as the disks they run on -- errors silently happen.

For me, periodic reboots serve two purposes -- Perform filesystem consistency checks, and install updated kernels (I am quite glad the 2.6.x.y series exists!)

It's more commonly known as scheduled preventative maintainence, and through the use of multiple physical systems, I avoid service downtime. (Even with virtualization, the host system needs occasional TLC too!)

> Dare I suggest that if you used a Debian based distro you could go live and stay live with less redundancy and pre-testing.

Been there, done that, been burnt by it. As I've alluded to many times in my posts here, it's the policies that you follow that ultimately matter. I discovered the hard way that using Debian didn't make things any simpler for me -- It just had a different set of quirks to watch out for.

Granted, this was a few years back, and Debian has addressed quite a few of the problems I had at the time... but as I've also said, if I don't see any tangible benefit to making a change, why bother?

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