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What is your longest server uptime?

Nick on July 20, 2018

Hi all! My name is Nick and I work as a Full Stack Engineer. Part of my daily job is configuring and maintaining servers! I work in a very hybrid...
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Dian Fay

SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter made the point ages ago that a year of uptime means that you've (hopefully!) applied a year's worth of patches, security fixes, and configuration changes but don't actually know if the system can come back up if+when it does reboot for any reason in your control or outside it. It's stuck with me.

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Nick

Very good point! I must confess this server had all mayor updates except the Kernell ones.

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Ben Sinclair

I don't know exactly but probably about a decade.

I worked for a while on recovering an application from a running server which hadn't ever been turned off and had "started making funny noises". I had to telnet to a SunOS box and grab the code and try to replicate functionality on a modern (well, modern for a few years ago) SUSE box. It wasn't just a case of updating the code, we weren't sure exactly how the system was supposed to work so I needed to run it in parallel on both systems to make sure my modifications weren't breaking functionality. That was fun :)

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Nick

That is some Sensei level stuff

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Nguyen Tan Vy

You should try kernelcare.com/ for kernel update without reboot.

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Nick

Awesome, will definitely check it out

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Mike

Where I work, we have a server that’s been up for 7 years, it’s a 32bit database server, not public, on its own vlan, it’s quite a beast - it’s officially EOL for us now, so we’re migrating it to our new 64 GB RAM, 8x2T server) (full disclosure: we’re our own data center)

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Nick

Wow 7 years? That is a lot!

Awesome server you are migrating to. Our SQLServer main server has similar specs but in a cloud provider.

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Nick Cinger

I'm working on retiring a server now that has an uptime of 1070 days, so about 3 years!

Was happy to see it past the 1000 day mark, ha!

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Nick

Awesome! 1000 days is a lot!

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Nick Cinger

Yeaaaaa, it's more of a thing to worry about, than a thing to brag about, as some have said haha.

That's not to say that nginx or mysql haven't "gone away" several times in the past 3 years :)

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Mike

My longest server uptime is 7 years, the box was a database server, internal only. It was taken to the trash today. All cloud means all fun.