Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 16:41:33 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Andy Holyer <andyh@hhbb.co.uk>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Way OT: How long does your box run for? Message-ID: <p06110445bd5e7d90c525@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <8F6BD2D2-FD85-11D8-8EBC-000D93511A6A@hhbb.co.uk> References: <8F6BD2D2-FD85-11D8-8EBC-000D93511A6A@hhbb.co.uk>
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At 9:45 AM +0100 9/3/04, Andy Holyer wrote: >I explained that generally some upgrade comes along that requires >a reboot, but I realized that I don't know how long a box would >stay up in the maximum. So, come on, this should be fun, what's >the biggest uptime you've ever had for a BSD box? I don't think it would ever "require" a reboot. The question is whether you need to reboot to apply some prudent updates and security fixes. I have one server that I try to keep up as much as possible. The three longest runs on that machine are: 373 days 10 hours, ending in July 2000 (long power outage) 599 days 14 hours, ending in Sept 2002 (UPS failure) 497 days 18 hours, ending in Apr 2004 (disk failure) The first one ended because a power-station going into campus was flooded (due to some construction in the area), and the building did not have any power for about four hours. My UPS lasted about three and a half hours before giving out. The second one was that the UPS itself melted down! Well, it did not quite melt, but it was seriously overheating and I had to shutdown all the machines connected to it and unplug everything. The UPS was literally too hot for me to touch, and once it cooled down enough (which took about four hours), I could see that the battery had started to melt. The third was a disk problem, but I also believe it was a OS error because the disk *getting* the error was one I should have been able to ignore. However the OS was confused over which disk got the error, and it kept resetting the disk-controller for the main system disk, instead of the one for the disk which had the errors. So, I suspect the fault for that reboot is half hardware and half the OS itself. If you are going for long up times, then the stupidest thing you can do is "install it and forget it". While I have long uptimes on this machine, I also have only a few network services running, and there are only two or three people who can log onto the machine (and I trust them). I use the ports collection to keep many things up-to-date, and for some things in the base system (like sendmail), I recompile them on a different machine and then copy the pieces over to this server. So, I manage to apply the vast majority of security fixes, even though I do not reboot and I do not have to stop/restart the main service that this machine provides. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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