[spongle]

I set up a dialup gateway for a company with NetBSD 1.3 in 1998 on a compaq pentium 90 desktop with 32MiB of RAM. I got a call last year (!) from the owner saying it stopped working suddenly. Pulled the disk on it and plugged it into an IDE/USB adapter and looked at the syslog as I had no ps2 keyboard and it didn't have USB.

Suspected hardware failure at that age.

Max uptime: 8 years, 122 days!

It was still being used (on a dialup). It stopped working due to the dialup company stopping service rather than a hardware failure.

Has been replaced by a cheap ADSL connection and router. Ironically this had only been an option for about 6 months due to the rural location and no DSLAM at the local exchange.

Wonderful OS although I'm ashamed to say I left telnet open to the public internet.

The same can actually be said for Windows NT4 as well which tends to show up unexpectedly sticking things together.

Edit: some other notes that might be of interest to long running UNIX admins: Firstly the log files had eaten up nearly all the disk space (2Gb) so rotate them! Secondly the clock had drifted by about 5 days so use ntp. Thirdly, don't assume that if you leave something that it'll be sensibly secure in a few years so they need to be kept religiously up to date. Fourthly, plan for connectivity modes to change over time and keep them up to date; the company was down for 4 days whilst BT got their arse in gear (not that they cared as they had 3G that worked reasonably well). Fifthly, buy good quality hardware - it does last!

[ivanbrussik]

"...I'm ashamed to say I left telnet open to the public internet."

how many people are really running war dialers these days :)

very good work, you should definitely have that on your resume

[spongle]

According to the logs, quite a few telnet attempts until about 2003 then it tailed off. Connection was up for around 2-3 hours a day. No incoming calls and wardialers as the modem was set not to answer.

No statistics on SSH though as it wasn't even running and possibly wasn't even installed. I didn't check! :)

(not putting that bit on my resume ;)

[telephonetemp]

Very interesting comment; I especially liked the content of your edit.

Say, if you were setting up a system intended to last over a decade right now would you use NetBSD?

[spongle]

No I wouldn't unfortunately.

I would, probably controversially, use Windows Server 2012 on mid-range HP DL or ML series kit. Since Windows 2008 R2 and the scriptability provided with PowerShell and PowerShell DSC have come around, it's a better compromise on usability versus automation that anything else I've seen so far. Not only that, it has a huge supported lifecycle.

Bear in mind I come from a very strong UNIX background going right back to M68K Sun3 era, through Solaris/HPUX and Linux and have used all on the desktop.

[gaius]

Ah, I remember that days where you could buy rock-solid desktops. What would I buy now that would last a decade? HP own Compaq but they are not what they used to be.

[spongle]

Indeed. HP's Z workstations are pretty good though.