Server ‘uptime’ refers to the length of time a server has been running since its last restart or reboot. Generally, people like to brag about “long uptimes” for their systems.
Yesterday, I saw an article about ‘uptime’ and decided to check the uptime on some of our servers here … This is normally considered Tempting Fate. As soon as you check the uptime on a server, its probability of crashing in the next few hours seems to rise rapidly.
So, I check the uptime for $ARCHIVE_SERVER and find that its uptime is 395 days, which is pretty impressive (early last year it was taken offline to install an additional hard disk). However, contrary to the accepted theory, this server did not then crash catastrophically. The theory may need to be revised, because, less than one hour after checking the uptime on $ARCHIVE_SERVER, there was a system crash on $EMAIL_SERVER (which probably had an uptime of about 100 days or so).
I promise I won’t check the uptime on any more servers for a while.
Meanwhile, my own personal ‘uptime’ is rapidly approaching 33 years … 🙂