[ale] cleaning out /tmp

[Michael B. Trausch]

Jeff Lightner, on 09/03/2007 11:35 AM said:
> 
> One reason NOT to do regular reboots is the perception it causes many
> uninformed types that UNIX/Linux is "unstable" and "requires" such 
> regular reboots.  This is simply not true but I've run into many a
> PHB that had that idea in their head.
> 

I can see how that might cause such a perception.  Though, it annoys me
that people will permit perception to slant their views on something
even after a clear explanation is issued.

Some of the reasons that I thought people did regular reboots still have
nothing to do with the stability of UNIX-like systems, as much as they
have to do with the hardware and creating a window for doing various
things that shouldn't be done with users around.  Reboots are hard on
hardware, too, so I've always thought that rebooting once per week will
give you an indication of whether or not all hardware is functioning,
since it is all probed at boot time anyway.

> 
> Once upon a time I worked with a team lead (who IMO was very smart in
> all other things) that required us to reboot all system every
> weekend AND run fsck on all the filesystems manually.   Even on those
> UFS filesystems this seemed like a needless exercise to me.
> 

Wow.  I don't run fsck any more than I absolutely have to.  Not because
I hate the utility, but more because it's asking for trouble, I should
think.  And a waste of time.  Don't all UNIX-like filesystems have
maximal mount counts and timers, or is that just the extX family?

>
> By the way - such /tmp cleanout - I did say to check lsof or fuser -
> if you were doing a cron with system up I'd also suggest you not
> delete any file that had been updated on the present day - some
> programs create files then "close" them and later "open" them for
> other purposes.
> 

Hrm.  That's some odd behavior, I would think.  Why would a program do
that... it would seem that it is saving state in /tmp by doing that, but
really shouldn't it be using /var/* for that purpose?

	-- Mike

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