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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: 3, Interesting) by tempest on Friday January 15 2016, @04:44PM
I retired a box around 2009 that was used for employee check-ins, although I'm not sure it qualifies as a server. No one knows how old the box is, but it ran on a 486 of some sort. It's main task was running a DOS application on top of Windows 3.1.
As far as I know it never died as long as it had electricity, but it suffered a lot of power outages. There were a few of these computers at the company originally, all in very dirty conditions, but even the "clean" PCs at our company didn't have working fans in the 90s due to our extremely high dust environment, yet they still ran. The battery on the board probably died after a decade causing the clock to drift, so the fix was to set the PC clock each time the punch-ins were read (once a day). There was a bit of head scratching with our remote locations when our network formally adopted TCP and our frame relay was to go away as none of them had IP networking installed. This was in the early 2000s mind you but thankfully the Win3.1 ip stack was still available and installed without a problem.
Originally there were 4 of these PCs, but one disappeared (can't remember why), and two died around 2003-2005. When I pulled the last one from service it was still working fine. It only had to be replaced because 1) I had no spare, 2) the AT Keyboard situation became cumbersome and 3) the company had moved to hardware time-clocks in other locations, so that was chosen to replace the PC.
Currently it sits on the "hall of fame-er" shelf along with some serial terminals and another PC which has "important HR data" that no one has any idea how old it is (likely one of the first PCs ever used at the company, and we were early adapters from what I hear - this is long before my time). Before I parked it, I released the turbo button to give it a rest (don't think it was hooked up though :)