root@sql:/tmp# uptime
14:37:53 up 927 days, 5:45

Yes, when I installed that SQL server two and a half years ago, I booted him up and didn't look back. Over 900 days is a long time for a server to be online; older versions of Linux would even fail after a point, automatically resetting to zero once they hit their limit. This server might be my personal longest uptime, but it's not the longest uptime ever, however. There's computers on the internet that haven't been rebooted in over four years. Still, 927 days is nothing to sneeze at. It's sorta nice to have machines that simply work, without complaint or errors.

Oh, the 'sad' part. The server is keeping up fine, but it's beginning to run out of memory. Right now it has an anemic 512mb of RAM -- that's half a gigabyte -- which was OK when it started, but the number of Wordpress blogs we're hosting has grown and the memory usage is getting up there. Two gigs of memory are on their way...but you can't replace RAM without shutting down the computer. So, those 900+ days will be erased, and I'll have to start counting all over again. I had been hoping to hit 1000 days of uptime, but I can't hold out for another two months. Sorry, Little SQL Engine Who Could: to help you get up that hill, I have to push you all the way back down.

The two new (used) servers that will replace the email and webserver have an interesting past, though. Each arrived with a "Property of Shopping.com" asset ID sticker on the side. Per our usual hardware rotation, I consistently buy 5-year-old used servers, so thank you, Shopping.com (an eBay company), for upgrading your servers and passing the old ones on to an electronics liquidator -- who then sold them on eBay to little old me. These servers are a magnitude of power faster than any other computer I've had; hopefully that means I'll be able to leave them on, chugging away, until they hit their own 900+ days of uptime.

It looks like very difficult to upgrade the SQL server.

--wall paint , 04/01/2012 00:16:16