Back in the Windows 95 days everybody was an expert at dealing with O/S problems. Computers either crashed or needed to be rebooted manually at least once and often twice or three times a day. In fact, it was this total lack of reliability that got me to start using Linux seriously. I needed to execute some tasks that took about 24 hours to run - but my Windows box was never able to let them finish. Moving over to Linux allowed me to run jobs that took a whole day or even longer to run.

Recently, though, Windows XP has become very reliable and Linux is - well, how can I describe it? It's so solid that it fades into the background and is completely forgotten. In the past few years Linux has become so stable that I often don't reboot for almost a year. In most cases systems are only rebooted for O/S and hardware upgrades. Even major software updates usually don't require a reboot - the updated service will be restarted and everything else continues running smoothly.

But this can lead to problems. After a recent lengthy power outage my main server rebooted - and discovered that it had been down for over nine months. It then decided that it needed to execute a disk integrity check before it could start. This took quite a bit of time as the disk is rather large.

To make a long story short: Everything was broken without the main server.

Services provided by rock-steady Linux servers are creeping into every aspect of our lives at an amazing rate. I hardly ever use my cell phone now in favor of VOIP (soft phones on my notebook, my PC and Pocket PC as well as IP phones in the office and the home.) I don't read paper newspapers anymore - I browse all the news services instead. I don't watch TV anymore - I prefer on-demand TV over the internet. Of course nobody fumbles with 33RPM Long Playing Vinyl albums anymore and many of us don't bother to fumble with CD's or DVD's either. We rip everything onto network storage and play it from there. Add instant messaging, email and desktop-sharing and you have a real problem: Most of the activities in my life now are going through my notebook, Pocket PC and all the workstations that pop-up around the house.

And they all stop when the main server goes down!

More seriously: I found that I am out of practice at the fine art of troubleshooting. Linux has become so reliable that it's easy to forget how it works. At the same time it has become far more complex. The number of internal sub-systems is going up and the internal operations of any given sub-system are now more sophisticated. In the past, for example, a server had a network attached to it. Now a server has a physical network attached to it - and two more virtual networks running inside it.

This creates a huge problem when something goes down: It's been so long since I assembled any given system that I've forgotten much of what I need to know to fix or rebuild it. At the same time: I'm frustrated because every aspect of my life depends on these things being completely functional.

Still, I'm glad I only rarely have to bother with systems. Mostly they just work.

Many thanks to Linus Torvalds and the many others in the Open Source community who make that possible!