Revolution Systems

Dumb Server Policies

I was chatting with someone recently about what may truly be the dumbest server policy I've ever heard of. He indicated that the company required that:

"All company servers were required to be rebooted each day at noon and midnight".

At first you might be thinking this is an old vestige of a Windows shop policy from days long gone, but no this included their *BSD and Linux servers AND all of their desktop PCs.  He also mentioned a couple of choice quotes from the policy:

"The policy has been considered to save the company thousands of dollars in fewer crashes. And synergizes with our risk management initiatives".

This just screams of a policy created by someone who doesn't understand the real underlying problem. While their heart is in the right place, I seriously doubt this saves the company money.  In fact, I'm quite sure it costs them much more in early hardware failures and lost productivity when systems are offline. 

The policy is almost as bad as someone instituting a mandate that requires everyone to change their password twice a day at noon and midnight in an effort to "strengthen our security". ( For the record, all that does is weaken your security as EVERYONE just has to write it down ).

The moral of the story is to handle the problem at hand with the proper solution. Restarting might be good for Windows based systems, but it is completely unnecessary in a Linux/Unix/*BSD system.

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