uptime 2 years!

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 08:54:47AM -0700, Chad Marshall wrote:
> Would like to share a success story which I'm sure you've had in the  
> past but one of my servers running FreeBSD will have an uptime of 2  
> years tomorrow. I plan on putting on my blog but as it doesn't have much 
> reach but wanted to share with you since your community has made this 
> possible. Please indicate where I could post this to have a bit more 
> reach or if you'd like to put a link to my blog, I'd be more than happy 
> to provide that.

I don't want to rain on your parade, but uptime ultimately means squat.
I can install FreeBSD on a box under my desk at home, on a UPS, and
leave it powered on for the next 30 years -- it tells people absolutely
nothing about the reliability of the OS, or what kind of stress it's
undergone during that time.

Additionally, long uptimes also reflect directly on sysadmins: I take it
to mean "the administrator is very lazy".  There are security holes
(kernel or userland/library-level) which are exploitable on boxes which
have been up for that kind of time.  I'm also making the assumption that
said boxes have Internet connectivity, hence my point.

Food for thought.  :-)

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |