Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 19:27:10 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>, Mark <mark@darklogik.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Freebsd 5.3 - long uptimes... Message-ID: <p06200702be0769f3ab7c@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1050109162444.64144B-100000@fledge.watson.org> References: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1050109162444.64144B-100000@fledge.watson.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 4:26 PM +0000 1/9/05, Robert Watson wrote: >On Sun, 9 Jan 2005, Mark wrote: > >> > FreeBSD will run for years without a boot in many cases. >> > > Ah, this point fascinates me. Running for years? Do you ever > > have to recompile your kernel? :) > >The longest personal uptime I've had is just under two years, and >that was for a UPS-backed natbox in my parents' basement. [...] At >some point, the power went out for longer than the UPS could keep >it up, so the uptime went tumbling down... I think it was up for >about 540-550 days at that point. My main "production-system" use of FreeBSD is for a chat server, which needs to be up all the time or everyone stops "chatting" and starts yelling at me. The longest uptimes I've had so far are: * 373 days 10 hours (a 6-hour long power outage) * 599 days 14 hours (a UPS melt-down failure) * 497 days 18 hours (hard disk failure) The third one many really have been an OS failure, which I will not bother trying to describe in detail... One problem with long uptimes like that: If the system does finally die due to an OS error, it is hard to get motivated to track it down. After all, the OS has had two years worth of changes committed to it since the time you compiled the snapshot which *maybe* has an error! To remain safe when going for long uptimes like this, I had a second machine running the same release of FreeBSD, and I could build the latest snapshot of the OS on that. I would then then copy over the bits and pieces needed to keep the production system safe (such as new versions of sendmail or sshd). -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?p06200702be0769f3ab7c>