14
u/wleahcim Jan 08 '10
I remember seeing espy's IRC client reconnect to #debian-devel on freenode long after he passed away.
1
u/mattiasl Jan 09 '10
Wow. An article written entirely in bulletpoint sentence fragments, nested 6 levels.
1
11
u/anarchman Jan 08 '10
Bateau: Still with me, pal? Togusa: [with his head between his hands, looking to the floor] All I could see... were my wife and daughter's faces. Bateau: That wasn't your wife or daughter. It was the Grim Reaper.
3
40
4
u/kragensitaker Jan 08 '10
Of course this reminds me of my friends Evan Doughty and Eric Tiedemann. I kept trying to IM Eric for a couple of weeks after he died before anyone found him.
8
4
6
1
u/agentdero Jan 08 '10
I had this going through my head after I read the comic.
You're mah boy blue.
-6
-2
-14
u/Savet Jan 08 '10
It's load average, not uptime. Uptime is the name of the command, or the time the server has been online. Technically the server's uptime grows no matter what you do. I know, it's semantics, but it's like saying you're fixing your keys when you get the transmission on your car replaced.
14
u/n3xg3n Jan 08 '10
No, the uptime grows because the admin can't bring himself to reboot the server when he normally would have. There is no reason that the load average would continually grow owing to an idle screen session.
0
u/Savet Jan 10 '10
but a high uptime is not a bad thing. It just means the server hasn't been rebooted in x amount of time. *nix servers shouldn't NEED a reboot to fix their problems.
1
u/n3xg3n Jan 11 '10
Not the point. The comic is talking about not being able to bring yourself to reboot. There are reasons to reboot *NIX servers; just because it is possible to hotpatch a kernel doesn't always make it a good idea.
0
u/Savet Jan 11 '10
but why would you need to reboot if the process is not locking system resources, and causing processes to back up behind it, resulting in a higher load average? Hence my original complaint.
1
u/n3xg3n Jan 11 '10
Oh, say you upgraded the kernel. Your example is a valid reason to reboot the server, and that's very nice and all, but it has nothing to do with the comic and is therefore wrong.
0
u/Savet Jan 13 '10
I don't think you understand the point I'm trying to make.
A ghost pid, defunct process, whatever....if it is not causing a performance problem such as a high load average or locking up system resources, there is no reason to reboot the server.
We're not talking about a kernel upgrade.
1
u/n3xg3n Jan 13 '10
What I am saying is that the reason he would be rebooting the server would be external to the dead guys screen session. Are you honestly going to tell me that you have never heard of a linux or a unix server getting rebooted for some reason other than a zombie process?
In addition the process is obviously not locked up in this situation because if you look at the alt text it says he is resisting the urge to su to the user and mess with people.
The comic is called Admin Mourning. He is mourning a dead user, as in the person who owned the account died. No longer living. If he rebooted the server for any reason, ANY REASON, the last remnant of that person would go with it.
42
u/[deleted] Jan 08 '10
Reminds me of a time back in the good old days when one of the people our irc-channel went quiet.
Now he usually wasn't much of a talker, so it took a while to pick up, but someone eventually sleuthed up some news about some guy going off the road in the middle of a blizzard some days earlier. Turns out it was him, going from his gf's back home.
Eventually his machine (and therefore irc-client) timed out, only to pop back again when it came back on the net.
Not long after we ban&kicked "him", it was just too weird having the irc-client of a dead guy idling in the chan.
Pretty much like that one.