Apologies for dusting off an old thread.
I think everyone's missing the point, especially the die-hard 'reboot? I'd rather sell my commodore!' Nix admins.
The point is that a weekly window should be SCHEDULED. Doesn't mean it has to be used, in fact the preference is that it isn't used as it's inevitably at some forsaken hour of the morning.
But if it's there, you can use it.
Personally, I think a quarterly reboot is a very good idea - it can give you a heads up on problems (hardware and software), and as the most forward thinking other poster pointed out, makes you aware of changes that prevent smooth startup that only become apparent after a reboot. Rather than having the situation arise after a 4hr power cut when taking another 2hrs to bring your box up becomes really quite embarrassing....
There are other upsides..
It gets the management used to reboots, and you have their confidence when you actually do need a reboot (e.g. physically moving it). If you never reboot a box, your manager's gonna be pretty darned nervous when you say it needs rebooting after 4yrs and no downtime.
You yourself get used to reboots, and know what can\does go wrong when it's offline.
You KNOW how long reboots take, so when it's coming back up and takes 10mins longer than usual, you're straight into the logs.
If you get knocked down by a bus tomorrow, there's CURRENT (not 4yr old) documentation on what happens when a reboot occurs (assuming you're a nice admin and write things down)
A 30minute reboot per quarter fits well within 99.9% uptime SLA's.
Finally it clears out the proverbial cobwebs.
To answer some points AGAINST regular rebooting..
The one about covering up a bad driver\memory leak etc is hilarious. How do you know it's a memory leak\bad driver unless you reboot the server? Not only that but what if you don't manage to fix it in your planned downtime? If you have a weekly scheduled window it's no problem! You just try again next week....
Notification system - if you have a planned window, you can set a planned exception. If your software\script doesn't do this, then I suggest modern software\better script writing.
As for the planned exception window hiding problems that 'happen to occur during the planned exception window' that's just laughable. Your other server stats will show this issue up very quickly if you review them at all.
Of course a blanket policy is not recommended, and you should have criteria for exceptions (e.g. disk space over a certain size etc)
Having said that, the bottom line is just because your server shouldn't need to be rebooted, it's incredibly naive to think that you shouldn't reboot it....
Edit:
I'm not sure I made this clear enough, but rebooting should NOT be used for plastering over a problem. The window should be weekly so that you have repeated attempts at RESOLVING the issue, not 'living with it'.
Rebooting as a method of dealing with a problem on a server is poor sysadmin. Nothing is learnt and it wastes people's valuable time and (rightly) lowers the management's opinion of you.
My point is
- It is difficult to ensure you resolve a problem without an accepted, scheduled, weekly maintenance window in place.
- With a weekly window you have an ongoing opportunity to sort things out properly, and avoid the situation where you have half-a-dozen jerry-rigged workarounds on as many different servers.