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El Reg reports
A chap named Ross, says he "Just switched off our longest running server".
Ross says the box was "Built and brought into service in early 1997" and has "been running 24/7 for 18 years and 10 months".
"In its day, it was a reasonable machine: 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive", Ross writes. "And up until recently, it was doing its job fine." Of late, however the "hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!" The drive's a Seagate, for those of looking to avoid drives that can't deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations.
The FreeBSD 2.2.1 box "collected user session (connection) data summaries, held copies of invoices, generated warning messages about data and call usage (rates and actual data against limits), let them do real-time account [inquiries] etc".
[...] All the original code was so tightly bound to the operating system itself, that later versions of the OS would have (and ultimately, did) require substantial rework.
[...] Ross reckons the server lived so long due to "a combination of good quality hardware to start with, conservatively used (not flogging itself to death), a nice environment (temperature around 18C and very stable), nicely conditioned power, no vibration, hardly ever had anyone in the server room".
A fan dedicated to keeping the disk drive cool helped things along, as did regular checks of its filters.
[...] Who made the server? [...] The box was a custom job.
[...] Has one of your servers beaten Ross' long-lived machine?
I'm reminded of the the Novell server that worked flawlessly despite being sealed behind drywall for 4 years.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday January 15 2016, @03:55PM
The power to keep the machine running would have been about $100 a year, so barely worth replacing, however what was the plan if the room caught fire? Did they really run 18 years without a backup system?
(Score: 2) by goodie on Friday January 15 2016, @04:12PM
Depends on the type of business... Many small shops don't have the means (or the idea) to implement redundancy. It's just the way it is. Dunno if anybody knows Steve's the music store around here. When I went there a couple of years ago, they were still running on monochrome terminals holding with duct tape and printing on dot-matrix. It worked well mind you. Anyway last year I went back and it was the same system but running on thin clients (vmware terms I think) from what I could see. Staff didn't seem to happy, they were having printing issues etc.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday January 15 2016, @04:25PM
But in those cases
You don't neccersarilly need instant redundancy - but some idea about how to rebuild the machine to fulfill the business function is important. In your example "they were still running on monochrome terminals holding with duct tape and printing on dot-matrix"
If one broke, they'd be able to use another. Worst case they could use a pen, paper and mental arithmatic^W^W a calculator app
(Score: 3, Informative) by goodie on Friday January 15 2016, @04:49PM
ABsolutely. And it's one of the hallmarks of music stores in most places I've visited in North America. No matter how recent is the store, a lot of the sales process is still very manual and involves you paying for bill at one place, carrying your bill to another to get it stamped, then bringing it back so that somebody calls to get the gear from the warehouse. And it's the same process whether you're buying a $100 Fender knockoff or a $2000 Gibson.
My example was just also meant to show that we lack some context for this. I mean we get the idea as to what the machine was used for but given its processing power, I doubt it was for a telco or something similar ;). It would be interesting to see the type of company that had it running. Where I used to work (small software company), there was 1 old machine (7+ years): the one handling the fax system, which is only fitting given the age of that tech :).
(Score: 4, Informative) by isostatic on Friday January 15 2016, @05:32PM
I work at a global broadcaster with several 24 hour news channels, I won't say which one. About half of the news video that's broadcast comes in from correspondents around the world, and it relies on one of three boxes - one c.10 year old HP server and two c.8 year old HP servers. If one of them breaks, I just drop a new machine in place, job done.
That's fine, but if the software relied on a specific HP DL360 G5 feature, I'd be shitting myself.