R P Herrold wrote:
>On Sat, 4 May 2002, Bill wrote:
>
>  
>
>>t seems to me that I have read of Linux boxes with uptimes of years. Does 
>>anyone have a link to a web page about this topic?
>>    
>>
>
>   http://bopper.wcbe.org/uptime.txt 
>
>prior run was 900+ days, current run is at 729 days
>
>"The administrator has not physically touched 
>it or its keyboard since 1997.  It has no monitor."
>
And a busted hard drive forced them to reboot.
Now I'm going to scare you: I was at my friend Joe's place (he's the 
Linux clonebuilder in Baltimore I mentioned a few days ago) one night, 
scarfing frozen Vodka shots, and he yanked the hard drive ribbon cable 
off of a motherboard that was running FreeBSD. It kept running. He 
plugged the hard drive back in, and it kept running.
In theory, you could make a motherboard running FreeBSD (or most other 
BSDs) go on until it had an onboard failure if you had redundant or 
hot-swappable power supplies and hot-swapped hard drives well before 
they hit their manufacturers' MTBF specs. And a motherboard with a 
conservative CPU/RAM and adequate cooling could have a potential 
lifespan of 100 years or more.
This is an example of *BSD's technical superiority/reliability over Linux.
Okay, it's a carny trick that isn't terribly relevant in real life work 
situations, but if your goal in life is a computer that'll run long 
enough to control a starship running at sublight speeds, you're probably 
better off running BSD Unix than Linux.
- Robin
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