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Solaris Machine Shut Down After 3737 Days of Uptime
An anonymous reader writes "After running uninterrupted for 3737 days, this humble Sun 280R server running Solaris 9 was shut down. At the time of making the video it was idle, the last service it had was removed sometime last year. A tribute video was made with some feelings about Sun, Solaris, the walk to the data center and freeing a machine from internet-slavery."
I'd just like to leave this here. Yeah, I know Linux is great and everyfink, but Solaris is excellent and better in some ways. Oracle really ground my gears when they stopped supporting OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana is going nowhere fast.
RIP Sun.
I will never for the life of me understand the "uptime fetish" that uneducated sysadmins have. Who the hell cares? The only people who give a crap about this sort of thing are linux fanbois. The only thing this tells me is that this machine has had an uninterrupted power supply, which is mildly impressive. Otherwise it's a Solaris box which is missing A SHITLOAD OF PATCHES. WTF, sysadmins? What kind of pro sysadmin worships at the altar of individual machine uptime? Much less a Solaris sysadmin?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Somewhere at my last job, there was a Solaris 8 machine with over 4000 days uptime, that everybody hated to do anything with, but one person loved it and refused to migrate the last service that was still on it to something more modern.
Uptime is irrelevant for an individual server, anyway. If there's fail over (and there should be if uptime is important), take it down and update the kernel for security reasons, who cares?
Really? Comparing it to Windows 95? You know that was almost 20 years ago, right? It'd getting kinda old. A more apt comparison (considering Solaris 9's x86 release) would be "WoW! That is 2940 days more than Windows Server 20003 could stay up!" ;)
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Just get it in writing.
Been there done that, when it has to come down for hardware failure or something like that you can show you tried to get a backup machine, you tried to do things right.
a slab of concrete has been found with an uptime of 3737 years
You exaggerate. The oldest concrete structure I know of is the dome of the Pantheon, and that's only been around for 1887 years. Time will tell if it was well built.
Last place I was at that had server admins that bragged about /years/ of uptime quickly turned into a discovery that we had thousands of servers that had not been patched in years. Only a few systems can patch the kernel without rebooting and those are the exception, not the rule. It turned into a six month project but in the end we were patching systems that were vulnerable to 5 year old exploits (mix of *nix and Windows).
I had to make the argument that server uptime meant jack, and to make it I put forward the argument that the only thing that mattered was /service/ uptime. Frankly it is the service that needs to be always available, not the server. This is why you have maintenance windows, for the explicit purpose of allowing a given system to patched and rebooted at a predictable time without interrupting services.
If your server is really that important it will have a fail over server for redundancy (SQL cluster, whatever). If your server isn't important enough to have a failover server for service redundancy that it isn't so important that you can't have a maintenance window. Think service, not server!
The only thing that matters is service availability.
I work at a Very Large Company (who must remain nameless.) We've got Solaris boxes that were last rebooted in the 90's. Yes. Really. Running Solaris 2.6, even.
I am not surprised. I've seen Sparc/Solaris boxes run for very long times and even when not properly cared for have run times measured in months and years. I've had to shut down boxes to move them that had been running for 5 years. We where scared to death the disk drives would not spin back up after 2 days in the truck, but when we plugged them back in, they powered right back up. Sun built some SOLID hardware and produced a SOLID operating system.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
an even more important part of your job then ensuring failover. that is, covering your ass.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
It is surprisingly hard to guarantee data integrity when doing a fail over.
If you want to guarantee a system keeps operating and maintains data integrity when a single computer fails, you need at least another three computers that are still running with no failures. There is a mathematical proof for this.
If you want to go lower than four computers, you have to make assumptions about how the failures behave. And if just one computer fails in a way that does not match your assumptions, the system will fail.
If you do decide to go with the four computers required to handle a single failure, the protocols to ensure they agree on the current state of your data are quite complicated. The protocols have to be non-deterministic. That's another proven fact. No matter how many machines you throw at the problem, a deterministic protocol cannot handle even a single failure.
You can get around the non-deterministic requirement if you make assumptions about the timing of communication. But you'd slow down the system unnecessarily because you'd have to wait for the maximum time you assumed packet delivery could take on every operation, and if the network was slower than you assumed, the system would fail.
Knowing how difficult fail over can be, it is no surprise that sometimes it is decided to not bother with it and instead hire an operator, who you assume can make everything be ok as long as you have backups plus spare hardware ready to put in production.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Thanks, not so many people know that there are 3650 days in 10 years, especially the geeks here on /.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
best way to justify the job you do is to create work for yourself
in IT you can covertly install a virus, which will have half your users begging to get things back up and running and the other half berating you for not doing your job
the last thing you want to do is increase your efficiency to the point where management thinks you are no longer required or that your role can be filled by a machine or some kid fresh out of school
or if you're a department of defense big brass knob, you need to justify spending billions of tax payer money, so you blow up 2 skyscrapers and scare the crap outta the public so they give you more money to go off and fight the world :)