On Wed, 23 May 2001, Florin Iucha wrote:

First he says:
> Whatever happens don't panic and don't reboot :)
Then his sig says:
"you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect"

Hmm... common thread here?  Actually, I'm pretty much against rebooting a
linux box, but in some cases it's the easy way out.  This was one of
those.  In the example you mentioned Florin, there was uncertainty as to
whether the machine would boot back up, so it would have been a bad
move.  In my case, I was 100% sure it would have fixed it.  OTOH, I have a
server with a 50 day uptime that I refuse to reboot regardless of its
condition.  It's a functioning sendmail/apache box that I consider the
most "mission critical" machine I own and I won't reboot it for any
reason.

I see the reboot issue as a pride thing, and on a brand new non critical
box I don't feel pain in shutdown -r now.  If it's been up awhile and it's
actually doing stuff, I'm more reluctant.

-Brian