

Ask HN: What's the longest Unix uptime you've ever seen? - sigil

A friend of mine shared this one recently:<p>17:06:59 up 1739 days, 23:38, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00<p>(A gentoo fileserver, 2.6.17 x86_64 kernel.)<p>I'm curious now what the all time record is, but haven't found a definitive answer.<p>What's the longest you've personally seen, or that you have access to right now? Details about the OS and what the machine is used for would also be interesting.
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baconhigh

      $ uname -s
      OpenBSD
    
      $ uptime
      3:37PM  up 2597 days, 20:57, 1 user, load averages: 0.12, 0.13, 0.09
    

Though, uptime is only a measure of how long it's been since you last
patched/did kernel upgrades.

This box is off most of the network and being left alone just to see how long
it lasts before it totally dies ;)

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saurik
Yeah... the OP friend's 2.6.17 box is afflicted with multiple published and
weaponized vulnerabilities. :(

Here is an example, with both code and a detailed explanation (I found this
much better than a CVE).

<http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/hh-12.html#ss12.4>

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runjake
Not UNIX but VMS. At an old job, we had a central VAX server running VMS. It
had an uptime of almost 6 years. I was there when they had to reboot it and it
was this big major event.

The sysadmin, who had been hired long before me, started after the last time
it was rebooted, so he was visibly sweating. Everything came right back up.

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bediger4000
You might have an interest in "The Uptime Project":
<http://www.uptimeprj.com/>

The similarly-named "Uptimes Project" seems to have expired, leaving only its
dried corpse on the web.

~~~
sigil
Thanks! I knew there had to be something like this out there.

> The similarly-named "Uptimes Project" seems to have expired...

The irony.

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ethomson
This would be hard to prove on _really_ old Linux boxes since uptime rolled
over after (just shy of) 500 days.

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wrboyce
I used to run a thinkpad t41 as an in house server running dhcp, dns, that
sort of thing. After a while, the uptime became oddly important to me, and I
once managed to move house ~60 miles without losing the uptime.

It died at around 1050 days, RIP.

~~~
Random_Person
Holy! I STILL use this exact thing at home. My T41 handles DNS, DHCP, and
print services. I just moved and it's still going strong... I never though to
check the uptime before I left the old house, but it had the potential of 5+
years as we have had no major power outages.

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cft
web10 ~> uptime 2:33pm up 1924 days 13:36, 1 user, load average: 0.39, 0.27,
0.16

web10 ~> cat /etc/issue

Welcome to SuSE Linux 9.3 (x86-64) - Kernel

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zalew
> What's the longest you've personally seen

there's a script for that

    
    
        /usr/bin/uptime | perl -ne "/(\d+) d/;print 8,q(=)x\$1,\"D\n\""

~~~
tekknolagi
Oh that's cute :P

