Way OT: How long does your box run for?

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Friday, September 03, 2004 09:15:00 AM -0500 "Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, 
S.P." <kdk at daleco.biz> wrote:

> 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....)

In the old days, we used to have boxes with uptimes in the 900 day range. 
Nowadays that would be insanity.  As a security professional, I get irked 
that some of our boxes only get patched annually (because they only get 
rebooted annually).  It's far too risky a proposition these days.

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/