Way OT: How long does your box run for?

[Bill Moran]

Andy Holyer <andyh at hhbb.co.uk> wrote:

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

Aside from various uptime projects like the ones David commented on, it's
generally not practical to go for long uptimes, for exactly the reasons
you describe.

In practice:
My desktop generally maxes out at about 30 days uptime.  Something comes
up about once a month that causes me to reboot it.  Sometimes it's as
simple as a few days off from work, and I turn the computer off.

Most of the servers I manage (which are all intended for 24/7 access)
see about 3 months between reboots.  That's an average.  Some servers
are more aggresively updated than others, and are rebooted more often.

The fun part (for me) is that this is all _scheduled_ downtime.  For
the potentialtech.com server (for example) has about 3 hours of
unscheduled downtime since Jan 1.  And that downtime is the result
of a failed UPS at the colo facility.  It has 0 unscheduled downtime
due to software issues.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com