__/ [ Jim ] on Friday 15 September 2006 03:02 \__
> I've just been hunting down the terminus of a LVP cable running at the back
> of my desk.
>
> What I found at the end of that had me staggering back in amazement.
>
> A Pentium II laptop (Dell CPx), still powered on, and still running.
>
> Have a wild guess what's on it?
>
> While you're guessing about that, a backstory:
>
> Sometime early 2004, I got hold of a vanload of "scrap" computer gear. I
> basically paid for the weight in steel (nearly a ton of it) and the fuel to
> get it all home. There were some laptops in there as well, which I tested
> because I needed something small to just squirrel away as a webserver[1].
> Said machine ended up being this CPx.
>
> So, the OS got installed, and the thing plugged into a switch and forgotten
> about. For the next year and a half (at least) this machine cranked out
> webpages, completely silently and without a single reboot.
>
> Now, from what I do remember, August last year, I rewired my switch gear,
> and thinking that the cable connected to the CPx was a flying dead cable,
> unplugged it from the old switch and tucked it back behind the rack. I was
> also, at that time, in the process of installing a new webserver, so
> completely forgot that there was a laptop under the desk, behind the
> kickboard under the drawers.
>
> So, for the past two and a half YEARS, this laptop has been running, lid
> down, in the dark and collecting dust, with not a single outage or restart.
> It still responds (albeit slowly now) to keyboard input. It's fairly warm,
> but not dangerously warm (considering the swings in the weather we've had,
> that's saying something). Battery still holds a good charge (it's
> running /this/ laptop right now and only dropping 4%/minute).
>
> It's running White Box 3.0 kernel 2.4.24. Abyss X1 Web Server.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/security/security_report_windows_vs_linux/
,----[ Quote ]
| Given the 497-rollover quirk, it is difficult to compare Linux uptimes
| vs. Windows uptimes from publicly available Netcraft data. Two data
| points are statistically insignificant, but they are somewhat telling,
| given that one of them concerns the Microsoft website. As of September
| 2004, the average uptime of the Windows web servers that run Microsoft's
| own web site (microsoft.com) is roughly 59 days. The maximum uptime for
| Windows Server 2003 at the same site is 111 days, and the minimum is
| 5 days. Compare this to www.linux.com (a sample site that runs on
| Linux), which has had both an average and maximum uptime of 348 days.
| Since the average uptime is exactly equal to the maximum uptime, either
| these servers reached 497 days of uptime and reset to zero 348 days ago,
| or these servers were first put on-line or rebooted 348 days ago.
`----
I can vaguely recall a famous story about the UNIX server that was 'lost' in
the datacentre. Once found, it was shown to have retained an uptime of...
was it well over 5 years? Desktop machines are a different scenario and, in
my case, since I run a lot of experimental code on it, more issues are bound
to occur. Still, I never reboot. Been up since the outage in July...
downtime is never even seen as a possibility. It has no purpose other than
to save electricity, but then again, every Linux machine, including this
one, is a Web server and remote access server 'out of the box'. The
gain/necessity of this surpasses the minor use of electricity when a machine
stands by, is on Wake-on-LAN mode, or hibernates.
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | YaSTall SuSE to figure out the magic
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
1:05pm up 59 days 1:17, 8 users, load average: 1.22, 0.76, 0.68
http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project
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