To reload or not to reload, that is the question.

[carolinas]

There seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to reloading networking gear, that is routers and switches.

What I mean is, if a piece of equipment is operating without a problem, leave it alone. In my case, I have core gear that has been up anywhere from 1 to 2+ years.

The first school says that if it ain't broke, don't fix it because as soon as you do, your're sure to have problems.

The second school says that from time to time, it is good to reboot equipment to freshen up resources and avoid potential future problems.

Now of course this is Cisco gear and not Microsoft, which probably explains why my uptimes are so long, but does anybody know what Cisco recommends as a best practice in this situation? I would appreciate any links to Cisco white papers concerning this subject.

[jwitherell]

First, I am not sure of any white papers or official Cisco documentation. However, my dealings with Cisco seem to be consistent:

-No need to reboot or reload for maintenance purposes. Keeping machines up for 1, 2, 3 years is no problem.

-However, Cisco folks are split when it comes to doing maintenance upgrades on software. There's alot of them who think maintenance upgrades, to fix discovered bugs or add new features you want to use, is good to do. Others think that if it runs good, leave it alone unless you have a darned good reason.

I guess I'm split between the two. I'm all for not reloading, but I regularly look at the release notes to see what bugs have been found. From time to time, something that I thought "the machine just does", but wasn't what I considered a problem is a bug that ended up being fixed. Along that same line, sometimes those "problems" and their fixes aren't noticed by me necessarily, but by the user population.

My suggestion is to stay familiar with the release notes of your currentl level of software, as well as the newer ones. Once you're familiar with those, it becomes evident when you need to upgrade.

But reloading periodically? Nah! No need! I think most Cisco folks would agree!

[bsivasub]

I agree with the previous comment. There is no need to reload periodically as our IOS is pretty much written to take care of things by itself without any reload.

At the same time, it is a good practice to upgrade to the latest General Deployment release if you have not done so in 2+ years. You don't have to go to any Early deployment release but a GD release would be a safe bet.