TR Forums

Deanjo wrote:

Lol, I remember my old K6-3 mail server that I had, just kept on ticking. When it came time to move I just unplugged the UPS, left it powered on and plugged it back in at the new place after going across the city. Stupid fan finally failed years later and cooked the CPU but it stayed up for years.

Yeah, stupid little high-RPM fans. The one on my K6-III+ died too, but at least that story had a happier ending as I discovered (accidentally) that the K6-III+ (which was nominally a mobile part) could run fanless without sustaining damage! That system is in Starfalcon's collection now, and still works AFAIK.

Flying Fox wrote:

Actually Seagate's SCSI drives at that time were supposed to be really good.

The high RPM ones ran really hot though! I remember touching mine and thinking it was cooking itself. It kept right on truckin' though, so I guess they were designed to run hot.

Their early '90s 5.25" form factor drives weren't so great. Severe "stiction" problems if you powered them off after they'd been in use for a few years.

I'm not one to chase uptime. Generally in my experience it just leads to problems further down the line. Going down and coming up in a controlled manner on a regular basis is a good idea. For instance, the next major release of AIX is supposedly going to include live kernel patching and I just see that more as a feature that management will use to keep pushing out scheduled down time. Just a bad idea. It's going to result in systems having to go down one day and not coming back up.

My last job made me very, very cynical. I worked to "transition and transform" clients from either their previous service provider or internal staff to us. When SAs who were handing over an environment would brag about uptime it was a major red flag we would experience issues. Every. Time.

Oh yes, uptime is usually a sign of a neglected server once it gets past a certain point (unless live updates are possible).

9 times out of 10 a server with a multi-year uptime is going to have hardware issues if it ever goes cold...