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That Old NetBSD Server, Running Since 2010

235 点作者 michelangelo超过 1 年前

25 条评论

keyle超过 1 年前
<p><pre><code> I now understand why I&#x27;m not – and will never be – rich. My first (and last) employer complained about my preference for stable and reliable solutions, equating it with lesser profits. According to him, unstable solutions requiring frequent maintenance meant more revenue. To me, a job is well-done when it works consistently, not when it demands constant fixes. </code></pre> This is a great point. Haven&#x27;t you noticed the teams that have downtimes constantly are hailed like heros for saving the day countless times. Yet the guys that have services running 24&#x2F;7 for years without a hiccup will be the first ones on the chopping block when finances get tight.<p>I am also in that boat. I too like systems that never fail, defensive programming, proactive attention. I&#x27;ll never be rich and most of my company has no idea what I do. It&#x27;s still the right thing to do.<p>Boring that never fails = Quality.
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rwl4超过 1 年前
Somewhat related story time! In the early 2000&#x27;s my main business was web hosting. It paid the bills but never made me enough to really invest in it. So it kept running, sitting in a colocation space. In 2005, having the mail server hosted on my web server was becoming a problem, so I decided to put it on a new server.<p>I chose a 1.42Ghz Power PC Mac Mini. I installed Linux, and was very happy with how well it worked, how tiny it was, and how it took a fraction of the the rack space that my web server and other servers took. I thought I might even just use those in the future.<p>Fast forward a couple years, and the load started increasing. I had used XFS for the mail partition, it ran Qmail and used used Maildirs which tended to accumulate thousands of files per mail directory, and the server was starting to choke. I also avoided rebooting it for years. If I remember correctly, by the end, the server had an 6 year uptime because I was so scared that rebooting it might brick it. But I had a major problem: this Qmail+Vpopmail+SpamAssassin+[dozens of custom tweaks] install had accumulated so many custom hacks, tweaks and patches that I never had confidence that I could do a real downtime-free cut over to a new system without a barrage of complaints.<p>So I put it off. And I put it off. Fast forward to about 2013 and I decided enough was enough, so instead of doing a fraught cut-over, I just ended email service. Problem solved. Best choice I ever made.<p>Needless to say, I avoid overly complex, patched configs now.
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johnklos超过 1 年前
About a decade or so ago I did IT for a company that had a large copier that could also scan to email. The email delivery stopped working even though this was Gmail and nothing SHOULD&#x27;VE changed (Google has never cared much about standards, so even now it&#x27;s never surprising when Gmail using normal tools just stops working).<p>The person who had the company Gmail administration login had tried to open a ticket, had played with settings, had deleted and re-added the account on the copier many times, but nothing worked.<p>Never being someone who is content to just wait for someone else to, you know, do their job, and not wanting to deal with the proprietary bullshit that is Gmail, I decided to do something far simpler: set up an SMTP server.<p>A $12 PogoPlug, an SD card, and a couple of hours later (I had to compile Sendmail from pkgsrc), the printer could scan to email and deliver by smarthosting through a public SMTP server.<p>People will often tell you that something is a waste of time because they don&#x27;t know how to do it or because &quot;everyone does something else&quot;. Some people tell me that running email servers is a waste of time, but standing up a whole server is infinitely easier than trying to deal with Google.<p>Someone from the company called me many years later and asked me if I wanted my PogoPlug back. It had been in use for at least half a decade before they replaced that copier.
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1vuio0pswjnm7超过 1 年前
This idea of the &quot;desktop&quot; still persists. I have often read description of the BSD projects as &quot;server&quot; oriented. Thus some may conclude, NetBSD is for servers.<p>However when I look at the personal computers I run today, there is no &quot;desktop&quot; because I prefer textmode and I am running many tiny servers. These serve only me not the internet at-large.<p>The dream I had at the time of NetBSD 5.1 was a framebuffer where I could launch GUI applications from the command line in VESA textmode, without any context switch (Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc.) back to X11.<p>If I have the choice between &quot;desktop&quot; and &quot;server&quot; in 2023, I choose server. The &quot;server&quot; is a more useful metaphor for for me than the &quot;desktop&quot; ever was. Eye candy GUIs can be seductive, but IME servers operated with text commands and text configuration files are more powerful and ultimately more useful. As it happens, the server metaphor is quite common. For example, it&#x27;s used to run the web.<p>NetBSD 5.1 was great. Arguably one of the best releases in the project&#x27;s history.
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ggm超过 1 年前
It&#x27;s also a tribute to the hosted VMs and the framework in general. Virtualisation has been an amazing boost, to reliability. Get on a platform with variant HW and then expose it as an idealised machine, to clients which can behave predictably.<p>I ran NetBSD systems for years, but I don&#x27;t think any of the BSD I have operated managed 13 years. Even 3-4 years felt like a big win!<p>I think how manufacturers of embedded OS looked at the field and went VxWorks, Linux or BSD is interesting too. By no means is it automatic you go to a linux kernel for a small device.
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baz00超过 1 年前
I posted this on here a long time ago but NetBSD was always a winner for me. I set up a dialup gateway for a small company in the late 90s on it on a skip dived Compaq desktop. Forgot about it and moved to somewhere completely different in the industry. Out of the blue about 2010 I think it was I got a call saying that it had stopped working. Figured I better go and look at it for them. Got there and found the disk completely full of logs but still spinning which was a surprise.<p>The failure was the dialup ISP had cancelled their dialup service. I found another one, signed them up for it temporarily and ordered an ADSL line and router for them and swapped that in a couple of weeks later. The compaq was retired.<p>Some trite syslog analysis suggested it managed 7 years of uptime in one stretch killed only by what looked like a power outage. There was no UPS on it.
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draga79超过 1 年前
NetBSD needs more consideration. It&#x27;s fast, reliable, secure and stable. Sometimes we tend to forget about it, but it&#x27;s a very good BSD.
buro9超过 1 年前
I have three servers still running since 2014, I know this because they run Ubuntu 14.<p>They&#x27;ve never been upgraded, they&#x27;ve only been rebooted a few times by linode during maintenance. I have no way of building them again, I have no backups, and yet... They are the production servers for a web app with 250k monthly users (not a commercial venture).<p>Seemingly I&#x27;m fine with this... They&#x27;ve just been that reliable. A python so old I&#x27;ve no migration path, a django so old I&#x27;ve no migration path. But yet they keep working<p>The only thing updated in a decade is an API built in go, which still compiles on latest go despite being written for pre 1.0 go. And I did replace the postgres server as that had outgrown it&#x27;s instance. But everything else, a decade old and still fine.<p>I logged in the other day to discover that SSH didn&#x27;t initially work as ssh+RSA has been superseded and needed new ssh config just to keep connecting.<p>There are so many things on these servers that no longer make sense, graphite monitoring that goes nowhere, new relic integration I disabled years ago, linode Longview long deprecated. And yet still the servers work as load balancers, and app servers for ancient python programs.
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bediger4000超过 1 年前
I used NetBSD as my daily driver at home, 1995-2001. Loneliest experience. Almost nobody runs NetBSD, even though it&#x27;s really solid.
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simonblack超过 1 年前
I thought this was going to be the story about the server that was still running, but nobody knew where it was. It turned out that it had been walled off during some renovation works years before, and was still running sweetly behind that wall.
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woleium超过 1 年前
That sort of uptime always scares the sh!t out of me when I see it.<p>Reboot at least once a month folks, even for those single node critical systems. Better it doesn&#x27;t boot on a Friday night than mid morning on a Tuesday.<p>Also, monitor and send alerts :))
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musicale超过 1 年前
So no Xen security updates for 13 years? [1]<p>&gt; The external services were active but inaccessible, wisely kept hidden from potential threats<p>Probably a good idea.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenbits.xen.org&#x2F;xsa&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenbits.xen.org&#x2F;xsa&#x2F;</a>
Animats超过 1 年前
Leased Linux box, running a somewhat obsolete service:<p><pre><code> Server status at 2023-08-27 21:00:32 System status: Database up for 2020.83 days.</code></pre>
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systems_glitch超过 1 年前
Love NetBSD, especially for embedded work. Cross-compile support is core to the project, and that makes life much nicer.<p>On the personal project side, I&#x27;m currently running NetBSD&#x2F;cobalt 9.3 on a Cobalt Qube2 microserver, which is an old MIPS server appliance. It lives here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qube2.glitchworks.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qube2.glitchworks.net&#x2F;</a><p>Mostly it hosts my persistent IRC sessions, and provides a few network resources to some of the old computers in the shop. It requires very little maintenance, pretty much just does what it&#x27;s supposed to.
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user3939382超过 1 年前
If anyone wants to play with NetBSD I highly recommend a shell account &#x2F; membership at SDF.org. It’s also nice to support an organization that’s been rock solid for decades.
pinebox超过 1 年前
Thinking back on all the breaking changes I&#x27;ve dealt with since 2010: 32-bit Linux distros discontinued, SMB incompatible between Windows versions (and samba versions) without tweaks, root encryption certificates added&#x2F;removed, OpenSSL requiring all SSH keys manually updated: This NetBSD machine may have been running for all that time, but no way was it unmanaged. Some Morlock was turning the cranks and oiling the gears.
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timc3超过 1 年前
I have the feeling that in the past this wasn’t so unusual, particularly as there was less security patches and more airgapped systems that didn’t need rebooting. I remember being in airports, government offices, large corporate field offices and the like, and these machines that have huge uptimes would have BSD, SCO unix, HP-UX, DEC alpha and similar installed and almost never Windows or Linux.<p>I still use a BSD variant or Solaris clone when I want something super reliable, but now with Linux I am doing an experiment for a system I want around for 10+ years (I do have experience with Linux almost since its release, just think its something I have to handhold more).<p>I also like in the article the engineer talking with the customer about the reliability of the hardware - I guess the customer was proven right or just lucky for once!
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SLWW超过 1 年前
I love SSHing into an old server with an uptime in the thousands of days, I can&#x27;t help but be amazed in those moments, quiet giants working behind the scenes to make the days of a few people work better, all the while most never even knew it was there to begin with.<p>NetBSD is fantastic, I also have a Manjaro box that has been handling some print stuff for me, been running for 3 years (with no intervention) and I often forget it&#x27;s there until I&#x27;m reminded while moving boxes, just quitely working and waiting for the next request.
ilyt超过 1 年前
Is that supposed to be impressive ?<p>We had multiple linux instances running for that long (live patched via ksplice, back when Oracle still didn&#x27;t cut support to other OSes).<p>Leaving some box unpatched in datacenter for a decade isn&#x27;t impressive.<p>Also there is actual risk server not restarted that long just keels over after a power fail for hardware reasons, more frequent (say, every 2 years, if you have kernel patching) reboots at least reduce number of machines that can die at once, as rare as it would be.
numlock86超过 1 年前
&gt; old<p>&gt; since 2010<p>I guess I am getting old, too. I have a server running Arch Linux (same installation but updated and rebooted, though) since early 2011 and I would have not called it old by intuition. I just realized it&#x27;s over 10 years now and not something like 4 like I was &quot;feeling&quot; still. :(
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whalesalad超过 1 年前
I just de-provisioned a Debian Squeeze (6.0) instance that had been more-or-less online and untouched from like 2012 - running a Django application alongside MySQL. I regret not taking a screenshot of the uptime but it was north of 8 years.
tomcam超过 1 年前
&gt; As 2010 was drawing to a close, I found myself on more flights than coffee breaks, constantly testing technical solutions, in search of stability and reliability<p>Don’t we all search for stability and reliability
torcete超过 1 年前
I am more impressed that he was able to configure all those services in just 48 hours!
Thaxll超过 1 年前
Imagine be proud of running servers with no updates &#x2F; reboot for 10 years.
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rfmoz超过 1 年前
Drop a message on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;uptimeporn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;uptimeporn&#x2F;</a>