Way OT: How long does your box run for?

Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P. kdk at daleco.biz
Fri Sep 3 07:15:14 PDT 2004


Andy Holyer wrote:

> The other day I was explaining something to my boss (a suit), 


You're a patient one, then ...

> and I mentioned that a FreeBSD box would easily run for a year or more.
> "Oh", he said, "and then you've got to reboot it?". I explained that 
> generally
> some upgrade comes along that reqwuires 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?
>

For a publicly accessible host, around 150 days, which is probably too much;
generally things start to feel "stale" by then, to me, and security paranoia
grows in direct correlation to system uptime (which should reflect more on
my perceived knowledge of security and paranoia than on the Project's
software....)

I've heard accounts of boxen acting as, say, LAN routers or LAN file
servers with uptimes of years.  IIRC, Netcraft now claims that most
new FreeBSD builds "reset" to zero after 400-something days, so
some of their statistics may be no longer as valid...


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