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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 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.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Did they power it back up again after shutting it off? Just to see?
One of my clients had a Netware 3.12 machine on site that operated continuously about about 16 years. It was retired unceremoniously when they moved to a new location, but that machine did not in all its life have a hardware fault or abend.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I'd differ with that. I was fresh on the job, just 2 or 3 months, long enough to get the feeling I would be the scapegoat. The owner came in, and a deal the GM had made in a bar 2 weeks back hadn't worked out, and as the 3 of us were walking to the back of the garage to look at what we had, The GM tried to say it was all my idea.
Wrong, I skipped out in front, spun around and said this stops right here and now, I was just following orders. The owner looked at the GM, looked at me, gave a barely perceptible nod, and started walking again. I didn't get pushed to take the blame again, but I did get pushed in every other way it seemed.
Owners didn't get to be owners without a sense of who's right and who's wrong in boss/employee differences. Tell the truth even if you lose, because if you lose, that job was looking for somebody to do it when you walked in. I'd a hell of a lot prefer to stand my ground if I'm right, and admit it if I'm wrong, and I've done quite a bit of both in my 78 years. Honesty has paid off handsomely several times.
About 2 years later another situation came to a boil, and I was the first one called to the owners office when he arrived. He wanted to know what it would take to fix it. I said 2 things, the gear these people are using is just plain worn out, its been on the road non-stop for at least 5 years, I can't get parts because the parts bills aren't being paid. I need 10 grand in parts, and I can't get a P.O. for more than $200 a month, COD. Hell of a way to run a train. Besides that, the technology has moved on. Its time to upgrade.
His next question floored me, he wanted to know if he needed a new GM. I had to say it looked like he was, at the end of the day, the biggest roadblock to making things run smoothly. Then he had another dept head paged, 3 all told in the next 30 minutes. Years later he said they all agreed with me, so we had a new GM by the next morning. That and $150,000 in new gear put out the fire. That GM didn't work so well either after a couple years, but that's another story I am not directly involved in. The 3rd one is a pussy cat and we sometimes get into very noisy arguments even now, just to entertain the troops. He's a decent man, a motivated manager, but in a war of wits with me on technical stuff, he is unarmed and knows it very very well.
Bottom line to this story is that I had already proved my worth from the 1st day on the job because they had about half the gear packed up to go back to the factory shop, expected 2 to 3 grand each for repairs with a 2 week turnaround time. I canceled that, unpacked them and handed in parts orders at about 10% of that per machine. All were back in service inside of 10 days, half that waiting on FEDEX or UPS.
So it was a question of who was worth more to the person who owns the place. I stayed there 18+ years, have now been retired for 11 years, and the owner and I are still friends.
Cheers, Gene