Ross says the box was “Built and brought into service in early 1997” and has “been running 24/7 for 18 years and 10 months.”
“In its day, it was a reasonable machine – 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive,” Ross writes. “And up until recently, it was doing its job fine.” Of late, however the “hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!” The drive’s a Seagate, for those of looking to avoid drives that can’t deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations.
The FreeBSD 2.2.1 box “collected user session (connection) data summaries, held copies of invoices, generated warning messages about data and call usage (rates and actual data against limits), let them do realtime account enquiries etc.”
Source: Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers! • The Register
