OT: server maintenance

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Nov 05, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>With neither thought nor caution, GCC Consulting blurted:
>> Just an observation.
>>
>> Most of you are running *nix indicate how stable you servers are and how
>> some of you systems have been running for a year or more without shutting
>> down.
>
>Eight years and counting, with only a couple of lost sectors on one HD so
>far that have been remapped in the last four months.  P166/128MB.  Aside
>from actual power outages that exceed my UPS time, it's up 24x7x365.

The oldest machine we have currently running here is a P75 running Caldera
OpenLinux 1.? (kernel 2.0.35) that handles our uucp (modem dialup and tcp),
HylaFAX, and limited e-mail.  The last kernel build on this was January
1999, and I doubt it's been opened since then.  Uptime was limited to long
power outages before I finally got around to buying a 3kw generator.

...
>> Do any of you do the same for workstations?  I find they are worse then
>> the servers.

Our workstations don't typically stay around long enough for this to be a
major problem, at least since PC100 RAM got much more expensive than the
current memory, and Linux performance basically sucks with less than 512MB
of RAM.  It's often cheaper to replace the main board and RAM than to
upgrade a 2-year old machine.

Servers generally are replaced every four to six years as disks get old and
flakey.

>Let's just say I wouldn't recommend letting newer systems go like this. 
>They run a lot hotter.  I surely wouldn't let an AMD go for more than six
>months.  Actually, I'd just avoid AMD altogether.  

CPU and power supply Fans are probably the most critical items on machines
today.  A couple of years ago AMD processors would leave smoking craters on
the main board if the fan failed.  I think this isn't nearly as critical
today as it was then.  We keep a couple of PC Power and Cooling power
supplies around in case of power supply failures.

Bill
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