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I was messing around inside top trying to diagnose a server slowdown and I noticed that my server has been up for 463 days. The server runs Linux Centos 4.4.
Want to share your server uptime? 
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node1# w
3:26pm up 754 day(s), 3:19, 1 user, load average: 0.27, 0.26, 0.28
@chankster – WOW! I guess the only reason my server isn’t up there with yours is that the hard disk failed. Even Linux has a hard time coping with that without a reboot!
I like how you scratched out your username and machine name -in- your terminal window, while leaving it clearly displayed in your title bar.
@aggrazel – yeah I noticed that myself too! I doubt it would have taken long to figure out my user name anyway and the SSH port is behind a firewall so hopefully I’ll be ok.
Ah, the uptime DSW. There used to be an internet project somewhere that let you install a client that would send your uptimes on a regular basis to a central host which would then rank everyone by uptime.
I used to think uptime was king… until I noticed that even modern unix OSs (or more accurately, the applications that end up running on them) can leak or zombify or whatever… over time this junk just accumulates and you need a reboot to flush it out.
However, there’s a better reason:
“Unix administrators are slightly more free, key word being slightly. Depending upon the vendor, they usually patch quarterly. Gone are the days of the 365+ day server uptime. In fact, if you run into a Unix admin boasting of 365 day server uptime, feel free to thank him for letting you know that his systems are missing several quarterly security patch releases, therefore letting the free world know that his systems are vulnerable to whatever ailment(s) were patched in the past year.”
…from http://www.sysadmin-network.com/profiles/blogs/reboot-with-pride
…that said, I have one system with 500+ days of uptime.
[root@saturn ~]# uptime
12:54:35 up 560 days, 42 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
As it happens, it’s getting patched and rebooted on Monday.
18:44 nico@jaguar ~> uptime
6:44PM up 755 days, 3:20, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
18:44 nico@jaguar ~> uptime
6:44PM up 755 days, 3:20, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
(Running FreeBSD 4.11)
I guess kernel patches containing security updates are less important than the all knowing uptime metric. Why not place the uptime statistic on individual “services” instead of an archaic server uptime? Then establish a high availability layer with something like heartbeat. Then you are free to reboot servers for upgrades as long as each “service” have a failover path. The “service” in this case could be anything from apache to dhcp.
That is a relatively high 15 min load average by the way. Have you found the bottleneck?
Why would someone post to the world about doing a terrible job keeping up with security patches?
@Jamie – the bottleneck is a rather large Java based e-commerce system that will be retired in the next couple of weeks. It hammers the server 24/7 whatever the traffic load… It is amazing the server has coped with it so well.
Nearlly 4 years…
***:/> uptime
1:32pm up 1443 day(s), 2:54, 3 users, load average: 0.79, 1.43, 1.32
@Tom – wow, what OS are you running there?
Solaris 8
Yes it does seem that patching has been a tad neglected on that box but it would seem a shame to destroy that uptime now
As an update, since the retirement of our Java based e-commerce system the load has come down significantly: load average: 0.15, 0.16, 0.11 as opposed to 1.15, 1.23, 1.49