ELi5: When a server is taken down for routine “scheduled maintenance”, what is typically being done to the servers while they cannot be accessed?
In: Technology
OS updates, reboots and other major changes to the system that can’t be done while it’s running can be the reason.
Ever wanted to move, delete or change the name of a word document while it was opened? You can’t do that, Windows won’t allow it. It’s in use and Word needs it in its current state, right at this moment. You’ll have to close Word, do your thing and then reopen the changed document.
This also works on much higher levels. I recently copied a database from an old server to its future successor. After it was fully copied, I tried running it on the new server – didn’t work. The old server was actively running the database, making changes WHILE I was copying the data, so I ended up with an invalid dataset (think copying a sentence word by word, and when you’re halfway done the sentence gets replaced by another. Now you can’t get the original second half of it any longer, and it just doesn’t make any sense). I had to actually turn the database on the old server off for a minute, in order to copy a valid and uncorrupted version of it.
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