Re: Freebsd 5.3 - long uptimes...
At 4:26 PM + 1/9/05, Robert Watson wrote: On Sun, 9 Jan 2005, Mark wrote: FreeBSD will run for years without a boot in many cases. Ah, this point fascinates me. Running for years? Do you ever have to recompile your kernel? :) The longest personal uptime I've had is just under two years, and that was for a UPS-backed natbox in my parents' basement. [...] At some point, the power went out for longer than the UPS could keep it up, so the uptime went tumbling down... I think it was up for about 540-550 days at that point. My main production-system use of FreeBSD is for a chat server, which needs to be up all the time or everyone stops chatting and starts yelling at me. The longest uptimes I've had so far are: * 373 days 10 hours (a 6-hour long power outage) * 599 days 14 hours (a UPS melt-down failure) * 497 days 18 hours (hard disk failure) The third one many really have been an OS failure, which I will not bother trying to describe in detail... One problem with long uptimes like that: If the system does finally die due to an OS error, it is hard to get motivated to track it down. After all, the OS has had two years worth of changes committed to it since the time you compiled the snapshot which *maybe* has an error! To remain safe when going for long uptimes like this, I had a second machine running the same release of FreeBSD, and I could build the latest snapshot of the OS on that. I would then then copy over the bits and pieces needed to keep the production system safe (such as new versions of sendmail or sshd). -- Garance Alistair Drosehn= [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteor [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Freebsd 5.3 - long uptimes...
At 7:27 PM -0500 1/9/05, Garance A Drosihn wrote: My main production-system use of FreeBSD is for a chat server, which needs to be up all the time or everyone stops chatting and starts yelling at me. The longest uptimes I've had so far are: * 373 days 10 hours (a 6-hour long power outage) * 599 days 14 hours (a UPS melt-down failure) * 497 days 18 hours (hard disk failure) I should note that the above uptimes were running 4.x systems (and the first one *might* even be a 3.x system). While I had forgotten that subject was talking about FreeBSD 5.3, I obviously have not been running 5.3 for the past four years! -- Garance Alistair Drosehn= [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteor [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Freebsd 5.3 - long uptimes...
Garance A Drosihn wrote: At 7:27 PM -0500 1/9/05, Garance A Drosihn wrote: My main production-system use of FreeBSD is for a chat server, which needs to be up all the time or everyone stops chatting and starts yelling at me. The longest uptimes I've had so far are: * 373 days 10 hours (a 6-hour long power outage) * 599 days 14 hours (a UPS melt-down failure) * 497 days 18 hours (hard disk failure) I should note that the above uptimes were running 4.x systems (and the first one *might* even be a 3.x system). While I had forgotten that subject was talking about FreeBSD 5.3, I obviously have not been running 5.3 for the past four years! Long uptimes = unsecured+unpatched boxes. Long uptimes? No thanks. -- Best regards, Chris Magellan was the first strait man. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Freebsd 5.3 - long uptimes...
At 8:13 PM -0600 1/9/05, Chris wrote: Long uptimes = unsecured+unpatched boxes. Long uptimes? No thanks. If you had read my earlier message, you would see that I take steps to keep the important components patched, and thus my machine has been as secure as a freshly-built system. Long uptimes are just a nice goal that I try for, so if there was a security issue where I *had* to reboot to fix it, I certainly would do so. My strategy works for me because I have spare machines, and I am constantly paying attention to freebsd changes. The strategy will not work as well for people in different situations than mine. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn= [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteor [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Freebsd 5.3 - long uptimes...
Chris writes: C Long uptimes = unsecured+unpatched boxes. C Long uptimes? No thanks. Most vulnerabilities are in daemons or other programs outside the kernel, so one need not necessarily boot the machine to fix them. -- Anthony ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
