Epic Uptime Achievement: Can You Beat 16 Years?

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
This has to be some sort of a record somewhere: a computer server running 16.5 years straight without failure and never shutting down. The unit running Netware 3.12, was just recently shut down after bearing failure from the pair of SCSI hard drives. I’m wondering if the hard drives are still covered under warranty. :D

Easing yourself into the week, you idly thumb through a magazine, and read about Windows NT 4.0, released just a couple of months previous. You wonder to yourself whether Microsoft's hot new operating system might finally be worth using.
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I had just graduated high school! What's funny is I admin hardware older than that...its actually older than me :eek:
 
OK, dude needs to find a couple of HD's and get it up and running for the next 16. No excuses.
 
Honestly, hardware aside, I don't even understand how it did not undergo a power blip at one point or another. Was it connected to some obnoxious back up power supply throughout the earlier years and up till now? If not, the local power company deserves praise.
 
Term-X said:
Honestly, hardware aside, I don't even understand how it did not undergo a power blip at one point or another. Was it connected to some obnoxious back up power supply throughout the earlier years and up till now? If not, the local power company deserves praise.
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There's a thread about it with more information from the person who shut it down, but...TL;DR - it was on a meaty backup system.

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1199529
 
So so , I had a year uptime on windows 2000 internet connected computer of a year :) (I'm a thrill seeker).
 
that really is an achievement, congrats for a job well done INTEL :cool: , but in all reality being an admin for the past 8 years, what I experience mostly as server reboots and the such are not related to problems in the OS or Applications running on it (unless you know nothing of what you are doing and don't care to harden the software for example), or even the hardware of the server itself, its notorious power outages. :D
 
Xinmosni said:
What a waste of electricity.
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3 users connected and 23 files open. You can't turn it off!!!!! Ever!!!!! ;)

The Netware 3.12 server used by a company I worked at many years ago had long up times too, much longer than any regular Windows servers I've used.
 
Netware was a workhorse
i have heard of some BSD based servers with uptime about that long as well
 
Wow! That predates my computer career by about 6 months. I got my first computer job in Feb of 1997.
 
Yes. 24/7/365 PC Clone computer running DOS 3.x. It is never turned off except for an annual cleaning, and is used every day. .

1995 in service and still running. ISA, Cyrix 486, no USB, etc. It runs the ORIGINAL HDD. Yup.

Want a video?
 
We had one of the first Intel 80486's (first month production). It was retired (still running) in 2011.

We have an IBM PC from 1998 that is still used every day. Again, DOS 3.x.
 
I had couple windows servers run for 3 years. Ran offline with windows 2000 server.
Best I have ever seen is a switch HP Procurve that wasn't powercycled in 5 years.
 
Back in the day I had to work with a Netware server, and I know just about nothing about Netware and was given nothing to start with. I was also much less experienced with technology overall. I had to reboot it often and I blamed Netware. But in retrospect is was most likely the shit software running on it that had the problems.
 
GaryJohnson said:
If it has been turned off for annual cleanings, it doesn't count.
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If you say so. You must blow out the dust.

And the computer in the article failed. Mine will keep going. For how long? Dunno. It does it's work, it controls and programs and runs a big CMM. It is a cheap ass clone. 230w PSU, does 3D transformation matrices in the blink of an eye.
 
Stupid No Edit.

That cheapo clone has made over $2,000,000.00 worth of work so far. It has chewed through at least a dozen keyboards. No mice though. Mouse driven software came later.
 
On September 24, 1996 I was looking forward to my 9th birthday in 11 days from that. That's a stunning uptime. As silly as it is, it almost seems a shame to see it retired. Foolish human sentimentalism.
 
Qinsp said:
If you say so. You must blow out the dust.

And the computer in the article failed. Mine will keep going. For how long? Dunno. It does it's work, it controls and programs and runs a big CMM. It is a cheap ass clone. 230w PSU, does 3D transformation matrices in the blink of an eye.
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Seriously? It went 16+ years without ever shutting down. Yours does not.
 
Holy crap, nice work!

I learned NetWare 3.x in college (even thou they were using 4.x for the servers), sheesh I'm old...:p
 
rsaotome said:
Holy crap, nice work!

I learned NetWare 3.x in college (even thou they were using 4.x for the servers), sheesh I'm old...:p
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OH, almost forgot, the NetWare 3.x computers were isolated from the 4.x's, since they were incompatible.
 
I've heard of long disconnected NeXT based mail servers being found, still running, buried in closets long forgotten :)
 
If it does it's job, and does it adequately well, don't fuck with it!

I work on equipment that is very old sometimes, with ridiculous up times. Seriously, some of the paper machines are physically older than i am, and are still running strong. The electrics have been upgraded and repaired over the years, as has the mechanical parts, but the machine hasn't fundamentally changed.

Not really the same thing as uninterrupted up time, but still impressive nonetheless.
 
I had to do a service call on a Netware server and found out when I got there that it had been running around 5 years straight. Scared the crap out of me. I thought for sure if I touched it it would die.

Netware 3.11 and 3.12 were very solid. 16 years is amazing.
I seem to remember a story a while back about a server found in a wall somewhere still running.

(found it!)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
 
Damn... I was like 10 years old at the time, waiting anxiously for my birthday, on which I got my first personal computer - Am486DX4 100 on a PcChips motherboard - yes, the one with fake cache chips!

I was the king of setting IRQ and DMA on hardware modems and sound cards. And I was the leader of the crusade against WinModems that came later on. No one could take my USRobotics away... well, except for a lightning. Damn you lightning, damn you.
 
Also, this PCChips board was so thin I managed to break it trying to put a PCI card on it (or something like that). And I'm talking about a EXPENSIVE computer back then. Lol, now I have lots of computers and spare parts around me, many more than I know what to do with... how time flies.
 
Ive seen Windows 2003 servers with 1000 days uptime. Live production servers in hospitals, no internet connectivity.

I had a Win XP Dell C510 laptop I think it was that broke 500 days. Then I stumbled on the power cord and shut it off, since it didnt have batteries in it. It was just used for surfing.
 
Skillz said:
Seriously? It went 16+ years without ever shutting down. Yours does not.
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True. The only time it gets turned off is when I decide to power down to clean or relocate. Since it's DOS, it doesn't crash, doesn't need rebooting, nor is the software ever updated. It does have an Arcnet card in it, but is no longer networked.

If you go years without blowing out the dust, you are asking for trouble. Just sayin'.

Yes, 16 years without rebooting or crashing is very impressive for Red Box 3.x. It wasn't all that stable.
 
Several years ago a coworker of mine, who did contract work for Southwest Airlines, mentioned that they had an old Sun box with an uptime of something like 13 years, running some horribly outdated version of SunOS. The box was critical to some sort of functionality within Southwest, and any disruptions to that box would cascade into major disruptions for the airline. As such, nobody was allowed to touch the box without prior clearance from the higher ups, and rebooting the box was never, ever a consideration, hence the huge uptime.

Second hand source, but plausible enough that I'll bet there are several servers out in the wild with uptimes beyond 16 years.
 
Levii said:
Several years ago a coworker of mine, who did contract work for Southwest Airlines, mentioned that they had an old Sun box with an uptime of something like 13 years, running some horribly outdated version of SunOS. The box was critical to some sort of functionality within Southwest, and any disruptions to that box would cascade into major disruptions for the airline. As such, nobody was allowed to touch the box without prior clearance from the higher ups, and rebooting the box was never, ever a consideration, hence the huge uptime.

Second hand source, but plausible enough that I'll bet there are several servers out in the wild with uptimes beyond 16 years.
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However, high uptime of a server is becoming less important as "high availability" of a system. In the long terms..adding more items in parallel is cheaper than ensuring one item be super reliable. It is an end of an era...but not we are moving to a better situation overall.
 
thedge said:
Ive seen Windows 2003 servers with 1000 days uptime. Live production servers in hospitals, no internet connectivity.

I had a Win XP Dell C510 laptop I think it was that broke 500 days. Then I stumbled on the power cord and shut it off, since it didnt have batteries in it. It was just used for surfing.
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This is the main issue with most systems. If it's hooked to the internet then it needs to rebooted regularly for update purposes. I wouldn't be slightly surprised if that version of netware had tons of exploits someone could use to gain access to the box. (In this case it wasn't even connected to anything for the past 9 years)

16 years is definitely some great uptime though. The fact that the drives spun for 16 years is the biggest part of it. I wouldn't be surprised if the PSU caps were also dead so after they powered it down the system wouldn't power back up. Even if a box didn't have to be rebooted for software reasons I could see power failures or hardware failures taking it out long before this.
 
We had a Novell server at one of the companies I worked at back in the day. I was even sent to an admin class for v4. I think it was relatively new at that time. We had to run vrepair once on our system to fix a volume issue once. I think that was the biggest problem we had with that system.
 
I had a Netware 4.x server in my house on a pair of Maxtor full height SCSI drives that I had running for 4.5 years straight. I would probably still have going (barring hardware failure) except for a divorce and move. It also was running for just under 4 years in its prior location, down for a couple hours to move, then back up. It's predecessor was a Netware 3.12 server that was also upwards of 3 years in uptime at shutdown. The 3.12 server was still operational and powered up from time to time until just a couple of years ago. It ran off 3 full height ESDI drives, one HP 340MB internal and a pair of 640MB Seagate drives in a Compaq external chassis. All of the hardware I got used, well used, and never had a failure. I didn't put 16 years on those drives though.

My server was primarily used as a home file server. It was also running TCP/IP routing to/from my roommate's subnet (who also had a Netware 4.1 server running for fun, they were both part of an NDS tree) and it was connected to a Wingate NAT router machine that hooked to the internet. I had the distributed computing RC5 cracking client on both the 3.12 and 4.1 servers.

As for powering down to blow out the dust? The 3.12 box was a 386 without even a heatsink to clog up, one moving fan in the power supply. A filter on the intake kept the cat hair at bay quite well but a shot of canned air the the PSU once in a while helped and was done without shutting down. The 4.1 box was a 486 with a AMD 5x86 cpu upgrade overclocked from 133Mhz to 160Mhz, tiny heatsink no fan required. It had a big 120mm fan for intake with a thick filter over it and I'd clean the filter once or twice a year and hit the PSU with a blast of air too, though it stayed pretty clean. No need to power down for cleaning. :p
 
TeeJayHoward said:
16+ years with no patches, security fixes, or vulnerability updates?
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If it's not online then it doesn't really matter much.

There is an NT domain controller somewhere around here that's sitting behind like 3x UPSes because it hasn't been rebooted in years and no one knows whether it will actually come up if it would be rebooted.

16 years is probably extreme, but this NT box has definitely been online for 10+ years for sure without a reboot.
 
Where I work we had a server with an uptime of 7 years. It was a Novell Netware 4.x server.
 
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