Mike also runs the best PCjr forum! It's been invaluable for help as I got my recently purchased PCjr running with mods and flash media.<p><a href="https://www.brutman.com/forums/index.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.brutman.com/forums/index.php</a>
The last time I checked on a FreeBSD server running Apache httpd for a previous client, it had an uptime of about 4,000 days.<p>So here is the obligatory:<p><pre><code> "Here's a nickle, kid. Get yourself a better computer."[0]
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:-D<p>0 - <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190304153157im_/https://assets.amuniversal.com/6b08abb09fbb012f2fe600163e41dd5b" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20190304153157im_/https://assets...</a>
(Sorry, I forgot to preface this with Show HN)<p><pre><code> ** 2023-07-14 18:38 PDT The DOS machine is getting DoSed. It's still beeping and happy but it's busy. **
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This website is hosted on a 39 year old PCjr running at 4.77Mhz and it has been running over 2,500 hours continuously now. No reboots or program restarts ... you can see the current runtime stats by visiting <a href="http://brutmanlabs.org/status" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://brutmanlabs.org/status</a> .<p>The machine specs are:<p><pre><code> - IBM PCjr w/ NEC V20 CPU (the V20 gives a small speed bump compared to the original 8088)
- jrIDE sidecar providing expansion RAM to bring the system up to 736KB and an IDE port
- Kingston SSD w/ a Startech SATA-IDE bridge
- Parallel printer sidecar, modified to be bi-directional
- Xircom PE3-10BT Ethernet adapter hanging off of the parallel port
- IBM PC DOS 5.02 and mTCP HTTPServ
- APC UPS (45 watt power draw with networking equipment)
- Dynamic DNS is being handled by my home router, which forwards port 80 to the machine.
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All of the upgrade parts are there for performance or convenience; you could use period correct parts and everything would work the same. (The IDE adapter would be a homebrew MFM adapter and you'd have to use something like a 3Com 3C503 on a bus adapter, but all of that existed in the mid 1980s when the machine was new.)<p>The web server is my own work, part of the mTCP project. Here are some of the features:<p><pre><code> - serves HTTP 0.9, 1.0 and 1.1 requests to be friendly to vintage browsers
- Maps "normal" looking paths and resources to DOS 8.3 file format
- HTTP 1.1 requests can be pipelined.
- can serve up to 8 concurrent connections
- logging to local disk and over UDP
- can serve pre-compressed content
- basic auth
- runs on DOS 2.1 and up
- built in SNTP client for time syncing
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Besides the UPS it needs the SNTP client to achieve long run times, otherwise dropped interrupts cause the machine to lose time. Without the SNTP client it was losing up to a few minutes per day depending on the system load. The SNTP client also helped it transition through the daylight savings time change in March.<p>The limiting factor is going to be disk space for logging; it is generating logs and eventually that disk partition will fill up. (I need to add log rotating and compression.) This machine was running when the ChatGPT client for DOS was announced, and it was hosting the mTCP networking pages at the time, so it got quite a bit of traffic. I learned after that to leave a lot of space for logs.<p>It beeps when somebody visits - enjoy!
I once ran most of a fish tank worth of water through an internet-facing 25MHz computer with at least that much uptime.<p>It stayed up, but I had to replace the boot floppy. (Not the whole drive; just the $5 disk).<p>No fish were harmed.
The machine continues to receive the hug of death .. especially with our friendly Europeans waking up. Have faith, it's still running. (And it's been surviving like this for four hours now.)<p>I've turned down the logging level a little bit and turned off the beeper. On this machine, a 50ms beep on the motherboard buzzer is 50ms of delay. :)
There is some beauty to the fact that even if you wanted to update your software, you can't unless you patch it by yourself, so you know that in a month or a year from now it will be exactly the same way you left it the last time you configured it (apart from the chance the hardware fails or the security by obscurity is breached somehow).
Somehow this is even more interesting after reading that OP is a Site Reliability Engineer for Google. <a href="http://www.brutman.com/Michael_Brutman_resume.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.brutman.com/Michael_Brutman_resume.pdf</a>
pfft...that is nothing. I was on a 286 running a DOS IRC client and managed to take back an IRC channel with more than 150 users that was previously taken over...<p>...no joke. However, in all seriousness: nice.
You can also browse this in DOS<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne_(web_browser)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne_(web_browser)</a>
The complexity of operation of 2500 hours at 4.77Mhz, single core, is equivalent to about an hour on a garden variety modern server.<p>In my mind, this stuff is impossibly reliable and should simply not work, but here we are.
That keyboard there was a work of art. I can still remember typing on one as a kid. So responsive, so satisfying, it just compelled you to want to write more. I own a few mechanical keyboards now and none of them compare to the original IBM Model M (I have heard that there are companies making 'new ones' though so maybe I'll have to try one.)
Could this claim the title of “oldest host on the public internet serving traffic”?<p>At first I thought “~100 days, so what?” - but that was before I knew this was an 8088 managing to hold up to even just the background noise of the modern net (portscans, etc). It’s surviving being slashdotted by HN. Very impressive.
cf. <a href="https://fsturmat.net/blog/04202022/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://fsturmat.net/blog/04202022/</a> on hosting a site running the same mTCP HTTPserv server under QEMU on a VPS, with SSL via Caddy reverse proxy.
Before cattle computing and non stop vulnerabilities, high uptime was a badge of honour.<p>Was not at all uncommon to have heavy use Solaris or Tru64 boxes with 3 years uptime.
Is there a link with more info (while we wait for the server to catch up)? Sorry if I missed it!<p>Edit: misread the CPU as a 486 somehow. I was wondering why the clock speed was so low.