Lassie Reboots

Hey! I have this problem too. And this is after 400+ days without accidents. I have:

1 server on Ubuntu 10.04 (kernel 2.6)

1 server on Ubuntu 11.04 (kernel 2.6)

1 server on Ubuntu 14.04 (kernel 3.15)

The former two servers were rebooted and the later was not.

I've got a reply from Linode stuff:

> The error that your Linode encountered may be due to its use of the 2.6 series kernel. I would recommend upgrading to a 3.x kernel in order to address this issue.

I'm not happy with this. So I'm looking forward for any explanation to get to know if update is absolutely necessary.

I too am using a 2.6 series kernel. Upgrading isn't exactly my first choice either. I had two reboots today and one a month ago, the first for more than a year.

Given that the kernels are many years old, have known stability and security issues, and are generally unfit for use on the public Internet, you should probably not use the 2.6.x kernels. I'm not even sure why Linode keeps them around.

Try looking at the 'logview' dump from lish… that may indicate why your kernel stopped running.

Well, 10.04 is LTS distro and will be supported until mid 2015. So when I made my choice 4 years ago it was absolutely not obvious that latest Ubuntu server is “generally unfit for use the public Internet”.

Ubuntu 10.04 is absolutely fine, it's the kernel that you've selected in your Linode configuration profile which is NOT fine. They are two entirely separate things.

Thank you, hoopycat! I've got another reply from Linode stuff and they recommend the same:

This issue appears to be related to a service issue with Linodes running 2.6 kernels. We've had widespread reports of this issue over the past 24 hours. You can update your kernel by simply editing your configuration profile and selecting an updated 3.x kernel from the dropdown. This will allow you to swap the kernel without affecting the internals of your Linode. If you do encounter issues, you can swap back to the older kernel without issues by following those same steps.

Thanks all for the replies (and to the Linode support staff for their responses). I've spun up a new node and restore yesterday's backup to it so I can test this kernel upgrade process. Interesting to see how it goes!