[c-nsp] Best Practice for ISP (Rebooting the switch)

[Rader, Troy D.]

A comical aside to this topic is people comparing uptimes.

Much of our equipment (6500/7600) is currently in the 2+ years range
now.  In the past, I have seen, a 2500 router up over 4+ years.
Recently, a friend at Cisco sent a note about a switch or router that
had been up for 8+ years.

Clearly, many of these have security issues that would need addressed
along the way, but it's hard to argue with this kind of uptime.

Some of the trade-off appears to be necessity of reloads for stability
and/or upgrades vs uptime, either for bragging rights or to show
customers how very stable your network is.




-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Justin M.
Streiner
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 11:58 PM
To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Best Practice for ISP (Rebooting the switch)

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Affandi Indraji wrote:

> I would like to know, is there any white paper or some written
evidence
> saying that half yearly/yearly/whatever it is maintenance is good for
the
> health of the equipment?

If a network device is stable, not leaking memory or other resources, 
doesn't have any relevant security bugs that I can't get around with
some 
combination of ACLs and disabling something, and it has all of the 
features I need, then I see no need to reboot it just for the sake of 
rebooting it.  Customers like uptime :)

If one or more of the conditions above isn't met, a reboot may be 
necessary, but they tend not to be on regular intervals.

jms
_______________________________________________
cisco-nsp mailing list  cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp
archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/