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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 Kromagv0 on Friday January 15 2016, @07:28PM
I remember doing the drop from chair on to some berber carpet as a last ditch effort to do data recovery. Sometime those shocks are enough to get things loose enough to work for a bit. Sometime is worked but most of the time it didn't. A similar thing can be done with car starters where sometime if you wack them with a screw driver of non marring hammer you can get them to work another couple of times so you can get to the parts store and buy a new one.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone