Topic: Why reboot?

[Billy Coleman]

I thought that one of the beauties of *nix was that reboots of the machine was only necessary for hardware changes.  Software configuration changes could be effected by kill -HUP pidof process.

Why does e-smith require rebooting after config changes?

BTW, I really like your backup process!  Is there a backup.conf that lists the files that will be included?

The more I see the more I am impressed!

[Joseph Morrison]

Hello Billy,

Thanks for your supportive comments!

Your point about rebooting is well taken. Our thinking was that forcing a reboot was simple to implement, and guarantees that the system is completely and properly updated. To avoid the reboot, we would have had to do a very careful dependency analysis (which servers to shut down and restart, possibly rerun ifconfig, possibly nudge the inet daemon, etc.) and the benefit for all this work would have been small, since we expect most of our users to change IP and domain information very rarely.

Over the long term, we would like to do this though, since the product will look more polished if reboots aren't required. But it's not as high a priority as some of the other requests we've been getting. (Of course, if someone helps us work through these dependencies, it will get done sooner

Thanks again for your comments!
- Joe