I was just doing some maintenance on one of my servers and noticed it has been online 505 days of continuous operations since I rebooted .. Its pretty incredible to think that little white box computer running FreeBSD has been going non-stop as a file server, web server (60,000+ page views per month), mail server (3,500+ mails per day), spam/virus mail gateway, firewall, network proxy, network monitoring, dns services, network time protocol server, squid proxy, database server and ftp server. I’m sure I’m even missing a few tasks it does without complaining.
Whats really cool is this server is up-to-date. No known remote exploits. No need to reboot for a security or software update. Its great. I’m actually slightly sad that I restarted it back in October 2005 because it wasn’t *really* necessary (I rebooted to make sure system services automatically started properly). Infact, at that time it was going strong since I relocated it to its current home from May 2005 .. so it would be getting very close to a solid 2 years of uptime but now I need to wait another 225 days… I don’t think since I installed FreeBSD on that box (Oct 2004) it *REQUIRED* a reboot except for the reboot after the initial software install. Simply awesome.
My personal desktop is catching up .. it has been going without reboot for 131 days .. if you look back on Smashedbug, you can see that was due to a hardware failure (backup drive died on me) — too bad I don’t have hot-swap drives in my home-built desktop computer. 