Is a regular receiver reboot useful?

HI all, I was just thinking about my ADSB receiver and wonder if it would be of any use if I did a reboot from time to time as it runs 24/7 to reset the rx from time to time
running v 3.71
Thanks in advance
Derek
G1gdb

Unless there is a problem, no use in rebooting.

No. It should run for years untouched.

One of my feeders had an uptime of 371 days and was only rebooted because I took it down and rebuilt it!

thank you all for your input, will take all comments on board.

Are you trying to solve a problem or are you trying to avoid having a problem?

if (it ain’t broke) {don’t fix it;}

Update and reboot often.

I SSH into my Pi’s once a month or so and run updates on them and reboot them. It seems like a good interval to me. You can go more, quarterly, but I find is easier to do it monthly, otherwise I forget! At the time time I check the graphs and sometime adjust gain by a few db. (“sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade -y && sudo reboot”). Latest updates. Your Pi is a computer running a full fledged OS, and talks to the internet, so it should get updated. Likewise I find 30 days is good, usually the Pi drops memory usage by 300-500mb at least after rebooting. Always a good thing.

If you system goes a year between reboots that means you’ve gone a year without major security updates.

In the server worlds uptime used to be referred to as a trophy and achievement. “My servers been up without issues for 3 years!”. These days, with 0-Day exploits, and all the security problems, more increasingly uptime is being seen as negligence by security minded administrators as its been you’ve gone that long without patching. Of course, there’s instances where some minor patches don’t require reboots, but more often than not they do.

You can set Cron jobs for simple reboots once a month. I have this done on several Pi’s I have connected with various industrial machinery at work and it works out well. Security updates I would do manually.

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You only need to reboot to use the updated kernel.
The rest of the updates are active without a reboot.

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This memory usage is due to cached files.
You could argue that due to rebooting you’ve lost the cache.

There is no benefit in this, filesystem cache is automatically freed if the memory is needed.

True enough. However you never necessarily know when there’s a kernel update on the Pi’s, I honestly don’t keep track of how often they do that. (PiAware uses a custom kernel, and I’ve only had my feeders active for less than 2mo, i do rpi-update to bring my other Pi’s up to date). And a reboot won’t hurt. If something doesn’t come back up when you reboot, then something’s misconfigured that needs attention.

I used to have a coworker that wouldn’t allow any reboots of this old old debian system we had running kicking around forever, hosted a web server and some custom stuff on it, because “there’s a bunch of stuff you need to do on it after rebooting that don’t work” and would never put the time into fixing the problems, or automating the fixes. I think it was more about job security for him though LOL.

They used to use an initramfs.

The current images based on Stretch use the stock kernel as far as i know.
And upgrading piaware to stretch is best done by writing a new image as the initramfs method doesn’t carry over.
(dist-upgrade after chaning apt sources doesn’t work. it’s complicated anyway)

Mine is set to reboot via cron, once a week whether it needs to or not. …early Sunday morning when there isn’t much traffic.

Yep. I try to avoid anything custom in the images except when it’s really necessary.

hi i dont have a problem thanks, just a general request keep well