Re: [gentoo-user] Re: New Intel CPU flaws discovered

[Dale]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 6:28 AM Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> wrote:
>> Count yourself lucky.  You could have discovered your disk wouldn't spin up
>> again, your PSU packed up, or even the MoBo chipset decided to retire from
>> active service.  Eventually, any of these hardware problems would manifest
>> themselves, but a reboot could reveal their demise sooner and hopefully at a
>> point where you were somewhat prepared for it.
>>
> ++
>
> You can't completely prevent reboots (not unless you are willing to
> spend big and go mainframe or something like that - and those create a
> different set of issues).  What you can do is take steps to reduce the
> risk that an unplanned reboot will cause problems.
>
> One of the best ways to ensure you're prepared for disaster is to make
> disaster routine.  Regular reboots can be a part of this, because you
> can do them at a time when you have time to deal with problems, and
> when you're looking for problems.
>
> This is why I've made the move to containers largely.  I still have a
> few processes running on my host because, but almost everything has
> moved into containers that do one thing.  When I update a container I
> take a snapshot, run updates, shut it down, take another snapshot,
> start it up, and test the service it runs.  Since each container only
> does one thing, I know exactly what to test.  If it works I'm good,
> and if it doesn't work I can roll it back and not worry about what
> that might break on the 47 other services running on the same host.
> Every update involves an effective reboot for that one service, so I
> know that in the event of a host reboot they will generally all come
> up fine.  I of course update the host regularly and reboot that for
> kernel updates, which seem to come about twice a week these days
> anyway.
>
> Obviously I don't run updates the day before I leave on vacation,
> unless they are security critical, and then I exercise some care.
>
> The downside is that I end up with a lot more hosts to keep up to
> date, because I can't just run emerge -u world once on one host and
> have every service I run updated.  However, I gladly accept the extra
> work because the work itself becomes much simpler and predictable.  If
> I'm updating my imapd container and imapd still works, then I'm fine.
> I don't have to worry about suddenly realizing two days later that
> postgrey is bouncing a ton of mail or whatever.  If something obscure
> like a text editor breaks in my imapd container which I didn't catch,
> that might be an annoyance but it doesn't really impact me much since
> it isn't critical for the operation of that container.
>


But none of this changes one main point, my system is in use virtually
all the time.  A KDE upgrade has been ready for a while.  While waiting
for time to log out and back in, yet another KDE upgrade came
available.  So, I ended up with two updates that were ready.  Still, it
took me a couple days to get to a stopping point where I could log out
and back in again.  Even restarting Firefox gets on my nerve at times. 
I've even learned how to figure out what tab is going wacky so that I
can either close it or reload it to reset it to correct either a high
CPU usage problem or it using a large amount of memory.  Again, if it is
in the middle of a download that may lack hours of download, I can't
just close it without losing what I've already downloaded. 

Even with that, I still didn't want to risk rebooting and having any
sort of failure, no matter what it was.  As I pointed out, I can't think
of anything that a person can post that will change how I use my
system.  One thing I have considered, building a second system and use
that to at least play my videos to the TV with.  Still, I download a lot. 

Until how I use my system changes, init thingy or not, it is still
difficult to find time to reboot.  Add in the risk of it all, since I do
not trust the init thingy, that just adds to the issue. 

Dale

:-)  :-)