Donald Russell wrote:
There have been times though when "things seemed odd" after a particularly large number of updates were applied... rather than spend untold amounts of time trying to solve them, I did a quick reboot... perhaps that was overkill, but it definitely caused all processes to restart.
Well, in general besides for a kernel update not much necessitates a reboot. In general, if 'things seem odd', you might want to consider one or more of the following things before a reboot: a. Log out and log back in (if updates seem to contain a lot of desktop related stuff) b. Log out, kill and restart the X/display manager (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace) (if there is an xorg package in the update) c. Login through a virtual console (Ctrl+Atl+F[12345]) as root i. Go to init level 3 and return back to init level 5 ii. Go to init level 1 and return back to init level 5 (if there are a whole bunch of updates which you don't want to check/guess about)
That was just a kind of thumb-rule -- the steps may/may not be necessary, but they are better than a reboot.
Perhaps if I knew more of the internal details of what's what, I'd have known that all was needed was to restart daemon "x"...
But, I'm not a member of that elite group (who know everything and are much holier than "Windows mindset" people), so I do what works quickly and leaves little unknown afterward.
Like Roberto, I do not intend to offend, but it is generally a good idea to:
a. Know what the services that are currently running on your system do. I don't mean you should read up all the man pages for all the daemons in depth, just learn why a service is/isn't required to run and then turn off the unnecessary ones.
b. Know what are the effect of the updates that you apply. Again, i don't mean read the changelog for all the updates being applied ...just check to see which area of the system they affect.
It takes just a little time but you'll learn a lot about your system that way. I know I do.
hth, cheers, - steve