Ancient machine

R

ralphbsz

Many years ago, I had an account on a service that shall remain nameless here. Their main shell machine was maintained by a gentleman who had been a member of the BSD group at Berkeley. Due to a change in management, the shell machine become unmaintained. Today, by mistake I logged into it (used an old script, which had the wrong host name hardwired), and was amazed to see that the unmaintained machine is working just fine:
Code: 
> uname -a
FreeBSD example.com 4.10-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE-p22 #5: Thu Feb 28 02:46:42 PST 2008     admin@example.com:/build/obj/build/src/sys/BIGSYS  i386
The machine is a 3.2 GHz Xeon (32-bit, obviously) with 2gig of memory. It runs with two Western Digital 1TB disk drives (WD Reds), which seem to be doing excellently. I bet the uptime is determined by power problems. Fundamentally, this machine has been running without any maintenance for over 10 years now.
 
Assuming that it has indeed been without maintenance (and without upgrades) then those are pretty amazing specs! 1Tb was an enormous amount of storage capacity back in the days.
 
Reminds me of a guy at DLR who had to power down his box so he could install a second disc with NT on it. On boss order, just in case he needed it someday. His uptime was 4y3m plus something.

Lots of these old dinos will happily churn along until a direct meteor hit kills the fans, when they will overheat.
 
I'm sure that there has been no maintenance or upgrades, since the only person who did that left the company at that time.

1TB enterprise 3.5"drives were available in 2007 and 2008; I think the 1.5TB drives were released around the 2008 time frame. Since this was the main server for a major service, I presume the person in charge didn't worry about spending a few K$ on hardware.

By the way, I have no idea what the actual hardware (motherboard, power supply, case, fans) is. There is no way to find out from dmesg, and since I don't have root on the machine, I can't (and don't want to) go around probing. Whatever it is, must be good quality to live this long.
 
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