You don&#x27;t need to restart to patch openssl. Kernel-patches are usually the only reason a restart is needed.<p>This idea that a restart is needed is Windows-style thinking.<p>&gt; more than about a month of uptime is probably missing patches<p>Only when you don&#x27;t know how to properly maintain a Linux box. A reboot is <i>one</i> way to handle patches. It is even recommended when you are changing anything related to the startup process.<p>For everything else, you simply need to restart any process using the old libs. If it wasn&#x27;t a security patch, you can often simply wait for processes to finish normally.