alchiba
02-15-2001, 08:58 PM
Every once in a while my ISP sends out interesting little emails covering a wide variety of topics. I recently received the one below, which I thought many of you would find interesting:
Moments ago, we stopped the final services on the venerable server we simply
named "HQ" back in September 1995. Our first server, some clients will
remember this little workhorse as a core part of our network, operating as a
Web server, a UNIX shell server, a nameserver, and our primary mail server.
Over time, as the network grew, HQ was relegated to fewer and fewer tasks
until the final decommissioning stage began in October 2000.
The server began life as a blazing Pentium 90 server with 256 MB of memory.
It was upgraded to a Pentium 166 motherboard in 1996 and has remained in
that configuration since. It runs the BSDI Unix operating system, possibly
the most stable and secure operating system available (I expect some of you
will argue Sun Solaris or OpenBSD in your replies--I'm waiting with
statistics :-).
Over its 5.5 years of operation, the server required 8 scheduled reboots
for hardware or kernel upgrades (4 of these were related to Y2K
adjustments). It crashed 13 times (including 9 times due to a bad disk, 3
times due to Y2K-CMOS issues and 1 time due to an operating system bug).
75% of the crashes occurred in its last 1.5 years of operation. Estimated
total downtime was under 4 hours. It operated for approximately 12360
hours.
Moments ago, we stopped the final services on the venerable server we simply
named "HQ" back in September 1995. Our first server, some clients will
remember this little workhorse as a core part of our network, operating as a
Web server, a UNIX shell server, a nameserver, and our primary mail server.
Over time, as the network grew, HQ was relegated to fewer and fewer tasks
until the final decommissioning stage began in October 2000.
The server began life as a blazing Pentium 90 server with 256 MB of memory.
It was upgraded to a Pentium 166 motherboard in 1996 and has remained in
that configuration since. It runs the BSDI Unix operating system, possibly
the most stable and secure operating system available (I expect some of you
will argue Sun Solaris or OpenBSD in your replies--I'm waiting with
statistics :-).
Over its 5.5 years of operation, the server required 8 scheduled reboots
for hardware or kernel upgrades (4 of these were related to Y2K
adjustments). It crashed 13 times (including 9 times due to a bad disk, 3
times due to Y2K-CMOS issues and 1 time due to an operating system bug).
75% of the crashes occurred in its last 1.5 years of operation. Estimated
total downtime was under 4 hours. It operated for approximately 12360
hours.