Best Linux Server uptime?

[Skunk]

Backup MX. OS is Gentoo. mailer ~ # uptime 19:19:03 up 1245 days, 12:04

 

[Jeff7181]

Even our firewalls don't stay up long. They get rebooted for patches and updates etc. I'd say every 90 days at most during planned maintenance windows. It's sort of essential when you sell a SaaS product with 99.999% uptime save for the 2 hours per month of scheduled maintenance.

 

[wirelessenabled]

we do have an old unix server (running hp-ux 11.00 ) that i don't believe has been rebooted in the last 9 years.
(no one in out IT department knows hp-ux...)

uptime will let you know. man uptime for parameters.

We still have an HP-UX 10.20 server running for some legacy applications. Never did get these ported over to 11. Never will now. Gotta love the response of a character based system on (relatively) new hardware!

Having said that there is a cron job to reboot every night so no record uptime for this one.

 

[drebo]

I would run Folding at Home if it wasnt for the electricity. I'm not too keen on firing up yet ANOTHER 24x7 box at home, I already have two, costing me an estimated $18 a month as it is.

Those load averages are nuts, as I understand it, a 1.00 load is 100% utilization on a 1 core machine. Basically 8.00 would be 100% on an 8 core machine and so on. So load averages in the HUNDREDS? How many cores do the machines have, and what are they doing to be hammered so hard? My servers barley hit 0.15 even when all of my friends are on the server. Course recreational servers vs business class production servers i would obviously expect to be a big difference, but still load averages of 150.00+? Just wow.

That's not how load average works. Load average is the average number of threads waiting to execute during the time period (one minute, five minute, fifteen minute).

A workstation isn't likely to see anything over 6-10. A server would because most server software is heavily multithreaded.

 

[Red Squirrel]

418 days on my online server.
150 days on my main home server. That uptime will take a hit in summer though once all the road construction starts and we get extended power outages. I really need to setup a better UPS. I want a 48v rectifier/inverter setup with decent battery bank.

 

[Red Squirrel]

[rauclair@shared2 ~]$ uptime
 23:41:23 up 630 days,  3:00,  1 user,  load average: 1.51, 1.46, 1.44
[rauclair@shared2 ~]$ 

ryan@borg:$ uptime
 23:43:13 up 128 days,  2:18,  6 users,  load average: 4.36, 4.26, 4.18
ryan@borg:$

And they keep chugging along. Pretty sure my online server's uptime is a record for me. I normally end up having to reboot for one reason or the other. My home server got rebooted to install my new UPS. Been through a 2ish hour power outage since and it chugged along nicely throughout. We don't get extended outages very often but it's nice to have that extra buffer. The new UPS is good for about 4-5 hours. It's a tripp lite inverter-charger with 2 100ah deep cycle batteries.

 

[theevilsharpie]

I don't know if it really counts as a "server," but here's my wireless access point's uptime:

Firmware: DD-WRT v24-sp2 (08/07/10) std
Time: 21:13:56 up 238 days, 9:58, load average: 0.17, 0.04, 0.01

 

[Red Squirrel]

That's actually pretty good for a wireless access point. Those tend to be the first things to reboot when network issues are suspected.

Forgot to add my firewall:

Same uptime as my server, since they are on the same UPS so they both got shut down to add it.

I need to upgrade that firewall though, they released 2.0 recently. I have another 1U server that I'm not using so I'll probably install it on that and do a swap. The current server has a single SCSI drive and I just don't trust it. If that drive fails the whole server is a write off since a new drive would be worth more than the server itself. Funny thing is though the server is a Pentium 3 and there is barely a dent in the cpu usage.

 

[Paperlantern]

Love pfSense, I have two old Watchguards that I tinkered with it on. Looked good and I would def be using it as my firewall solution if I didn't have a firewall issued by my work in place.

 

[stoomy]

Oracle box:


[root@XXXXorclXXX ~]# uname -a
Linux XXXXorclXXX.XXXXXX.com 2.6.9-78.0.13.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed Jan 7 17:52:47 EST 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[root@XXXXorclXXXX ~]# uptime
09:28:46 up 1387 days, 15:55, 5 users, load average: 11.00, 11.03, 11.04
[root@XXXXXorclXXX ~]# dmidecode |grep Product
Product Name: PowerEdge 2850

 

[Red Squirrel]

Nice!

I would cry if I had to reboot that box and lose that number.

 

[Nothinman]

I would cry if I had to run Oracle...

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hahaha true.

 

[plambrecht]

$ uptime
10:45:05 up 2509 days, 23:54, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00

first server we installed for a customer... not running production, only uptime couter
we keep tis running forever !
soon they will be migrating to a new DC, so the UPS has been ordered

p.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Woah, that's like over 6 years. Crazy!

My online server is still chugging along:

12:45:16 up 765 days, 17:03, 1 user, load average: 1.51, 1.55, 1.58

Home server, not as impressive but still not too bad:

12:46:11 up 263 days, 16:20, 5 users, load average: 4.48, 4.38, 4.32

It's been through 2 big power outages too. Got 2 100AH batteries to keep it going. Need to add more though. As this server ages it is less likely to come back up if it goes down so I need to keep it going till I can afford to build a new one. It acts funny sometimes. Lot of errors in dmesg. Think the cpu or motherboard is starting to go.

 

[debian0001]

We had a physical box running Red hat at work that was up for 600 days. Had to reboot it because Oracle backups started failing .

 

[Jeff7181]

I hear people saying all the time that Linux servers don't need to be rebooted as often as Windows servers to install patches, but it seems like every 2 or 3 weeks, there are updates for my minecraft server and it says: *** System restart required ***

I suppose people with really high uptimes are just not rebooting, or is Ubuntu server a little more "reboot-happy" than other distros?

 

[Crusty]

I hear people saying all the time that Linux servers don't need to be rebooted as often as Windows servers to install patches, but it seems like every 2 or 3 weeks, there are updates for my minecraft server and it says: *** System restart required ***

I suppose people with really high uptimes are just not rebooting, or is Ubuntu server a little more "reboot-happy" than other distros?

I've never had Ubuntu server tell me a reboot was required unless a new kernel update is out, and even then you have to tell it you want to install the new version first.

 

[lxskllr]

I suppose people with really high uptimes are just not rebooting, or is Ubuntu server a little more "reboot-happy" than other distros?

Dunno about servers, but I'm still getting kernel updates on my desktop Ubuntu 10.04 system. Enterprise systems tend to be more conservative, so you're less likely to have big changes. I suspect Ubuntu server is more like their desktops, with fairly frequent updates.

 

[Nothinman]

I hear people saying all the time that Linux servers don't need to be rebooted as often as Windows servers to install patches, but it seems like every 2 or 3 weeks, there are updates for my minecraft server and it says: *** System restart required ***

I suppose people with really high uptimes are just not rebooting, or is Ubuntu server a little more "reboot-happy" than other distros?

I think that required bit is overstated and just says that to be sure. Nothing but the kernel truly requires a reboot, however if you update something core like glibc you need to restart every process using it to ensure it's using the latest version and the most effective way to do that is a reboot. When a file is deleted only the directory entry is removed until all references to the actual data are closed, so when you updated a shared library all of the processes using that library keep using the old version until the process exists and restarts even though the new version is already there on-disk seemingly right where the other one was.

 

[Jeff7181]

I've never had Ubuntu server tell me a reboot was required unless a new kernel update is out, and even then you have to tell it you want to install the new version first.

I log in and see:

3 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

*** System restart required ***

~$ sudo aptitude upgrade -s
The following packages will be REMOVED:
linux-headers-3.2.0-37{u} linux-headers-3.2.0-37-generic{u}
The following packages will be upgraded:
libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-glx libglapi-mesa
3 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3,157 kB of archives. After unpacking 67.5 MB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

 

[Crusty]

It looks like you just previously updated your kernel and haven't rebooted since then.

FWIW I always use sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get ugprade which by default will NOT update your kernel.

 

[Jeff7181]

It looks like you just previously updated your kernel and haven't rebooted since then.

FWIW I always use sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get ugprade which by default will NOT update your kernel.

I haven't run an upgrade since the last reboot 16 days ago, and it's not configured to install anything automatically.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Every time there's updates for Ubuntu it ask's me to reboot. I should probably do my updates through apt-get instead of the GUI utility, though I don't know if that would cause some kind of conflict.

 

[Nothinman]

Every time there's updates for Ubuntu it ask's me to reboot. I should probably do my updates through apt-get instead of the GUI utility, though I don't know if that would cause some kind of conflict.

They use the same back-end so there should be no conflict. However, I don't think it will change anything as they use the same back-end. As I said above, I believe they have just made their system slightly overzealous about reboots when they may not be absolutely necessary.