Ask HN: What's the longest Unix uptime you've ever seen? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the longest Unix uptime you've ever seen?

14 pointssigil11 comments

A friend of mine shared this one recently:

17:06:59 up 1739 days, 23:38, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

(A gentoo fileserver, 2.6.17 x86_64 kernel.)

I'm curious now what the all time record is, but haven't found a definitive answer.

What's the longest you've personally seen, or that you have access to right now? Details about the OS and what the machine is used for would also be interesting.

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Not UNIX but VMS. At an old job, we had a central VAX server running VMS. It had an uptime of almost 6 years. I was there when they had to reboot it and it was this big major event.

The sysadmin, who had been hired long before me, started after the last time it was rebooted, so he was visibly sweating. Everything came right back up.

  $ uname -s
  OpenBSD

  $ uptime
  3:37PM  up 2597 days, 20:57, 1 user, load averages: 0.12, 0.13, 0.09

Though, uptime is only a measure of how long it's been since you last patched/did kernel upgrades.

This box is off most of the network and being left alone just to see how long it lasts before it totally dies ;)

Yeah... the OP friend's 2.6.17 box is afflicted with multiple published and weaponized vulnerabilities. :(

Here is an example, with both code and a detailed explanation (I found this much better than a CVE).

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/hh-12.html#ss12.4

You might have an interest in "The Uptime Project": http://www.uptimeprj.com/

The similarly-named "Uptimes Project" seems to have expired, leaving only its dried corpse on the web.

Thanks! I knew there had to be something like this out there.

> The similarly-named "Uptimes Project" seems to have expired...

The irony.

This would be hard to prove on really old Linux boxes since uptime rolled over after (just shy of) 500 days.

I used to run a thinkpad t41 as an in house server running dhcp, dns, that sort of thing. After a while, the uptime became oddly important to me, and I once managed to move house ~60 miles without losing the uptime.

It died at around 1050 days, RIP.

Holy! I STILL use this exact thing at home. My T41 handles DNS, DHCP, and print services. I just moved and it's still going strong... I never though to check the uptime before I left the old house, but it had the potential of 5+ years as we have had no major power outages.

web10 ~> uptime 2:33pm up 1924 days 13:36, 1 user, load average: 0.39, 0.27, 0.16

web10 ~> cat /etc/issue

Welcome to SuSE Linux 9.3 (x86-64) - Kernel

> What's the longest you've personally seen

there's a script for that

    /usr/bin/uptime | perl -ne "/(\d+) d/;print 8,q(=)x\$1,\"D\n\""

Oh that's cute :P

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