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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2016, @08:11PM
I started my career in 1996 at a nuclear power station, one of the oldest commercial ones in the world. It was commissioned in 1962 and was very much the cutting edge of 1950s technology. The primary reactor temperature monitoring computer was a Honeywell 316 which was commissioned in 1972, the year my parents were married. It monitored temperatures in both reactors in real time. There were green screen ASCII displays for each reactor and a real TTY for the console. It had 32k of magnetic core store, a built-in 160k hard disk and a paper tape drive for bootstrap. The old Control and Instrumentation guys had a funny chant and a dance to help them remember the toggle switch pattern/sequence (16 switches on the front panel) for entering the boot loader. It was immune to the Y2K bug because it didn't care how many days there were in the month or what year it was. There was no filesystem on the disk, You accessed it with an octal monitor program, a sector at a time. There was nothing wrong with it other than the disk started to die in summer 2000 and it was replaced by a pair of PDP-11/70s running RSX-11M which had been the backup system since the early 1980s.