Now that's what you'd call...
..a dedicated server. (…)
The longest I've seen a "server" run nonstop was a machine that had been handling mailservice for over 6 years non-stop - from the day it was put into service, nobody had even touched it. I'd been called in to streamline all IT systems in this office, with most systems hanging on by a thread, some of them crashing daily and the lot being quite temperamental, but not this one. It was of all things, a PowerMac 6100 running at all of 60 MHz and sporting a whopping 16 MB of RAM, possibly one of the most underwhelming desktops Apple ever made - the codename Piltdown Man was at this point pretty appropriate.
I marveled at the longevity and stability of this heavily underspec'ed setup, but after setting up a solid backup schedule decided to just cross my fingers and leave it for the moment, since it was functional enough, and to focus on the really unstable stuff first. Sure enough it plowed along just fine, and only when the power in the whole block went out, Piltdown Man spun down for the first and last time, to be replaced by a machine with a bit more than a single memory chip, harddisk, and network port.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
