The Server That Ran 2487 Days Without a Reboot

The last day of January 2019 brought us a small melancholic anniversary. In the USA we shut down a server with an uptime of 2487 days. That means it ran without a break, without an outage and without a reboot for almost 7 years, 6 years, 9 months and 23 days to be exact. In that time it survived several DDoS attacks and a few power failures, which it came through mainly because it had two power supplies fed from two independent circuits.

I installed the server shortly after my arrival in the USA in 2012. I placed it in a data center called Corelink in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. The data center was later bought by Zayo Group. Our server, however, paid no attention to business matters and kept running happily along :-)

The server was named Jomax, after a street in Phoenix. During its life it went through several IP addresses, but one stayed with it from beginning to end: 64.64.218.209

As you have probably guessed, the server was not exactly one of the younger ones. It was an old DELL PowerEdge 1850 with two SCSI drives in RAID-1. These days, SCSI drives are probably remembered only by experts and veterans of server technology. Originally we ran a DNS server on it, later a VPN server, and towards the end of its life it served only as an access point to the serial console of the other servers.

jomax:~# uname -a
Linux jomax 2.6.32-trunk-686 #1 SMP Sun Jan 10 06:32:16 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

Despite its 32 bits and its old kernel, it did its job more than well. It would certainly have handled another 7 years, but progress cannot be stopped. Many of its younger colleagues have meanwhile been migrated to the cloud, or travelled north to the state of Washington, where the conditions for running servers are considerably better (cooling is easier).

In the end it was left in the rack completely alone. Now, after 2487 days, we have to say goodbye to it. We thank it for its long years of steady work with this blog post and with the video.

jomax:~# date
Thu Jan 31 16:45:47 MST 2019
jomax:~# uptime
 16:45:54 up 2487 days,  1:26,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.03, 0.00
jomax:~# shutdown -h now

PS: How many servers can boast that an article was written about them? :)