Re: Enquiry regarding Linux in Mission Critical situation

From: Captain Dondo (captain@thebigsandbox.com)
Date: 06/28/02 

From: Captain Dondo <captain@thebigsandbox.com>
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2002 17:44:01 -0400

On Fri, 28 Jun 2002 15:16:29 -0400, mlw wrote:

> Linux, and UNIX for that matter, will typically have a longer uptime
> than will a Windows system becuase there is a very strong separation
> between OS and application. In Windows, it is very posible for one
> application to corrupt the OS, under UNIX is it much harder. If you do
> not run X on your system, there is virtually no reason your system will
> crash from an OS level issue.
>
> There are, however, other reasons why a systom could crash:
>
> Hard disks
> CPU fans
> Power Supply fans
> Room temperature
> static electricity
>
>
>
I had to replace a server a few months ago in a remote office because the
hard drives were getting full. (Sounds stupid, but read on.)

This system had been in continuous service for 5 years, rebooting only
when there was an extended power failure. It was a dual PPro, with 18 GB
in a RAID array. (The reason we replaced it was the raid - 4x9 GB drives
running at 20 MB/sec, raid-5 + 1 spare). The server was the file server,
email server, printer server, you name it for a small office.

Anyway, when I took this thing down, I wanted to give it to a local
school, so I checked it out.

Turns out that one of the drives was dead, one CPU fan was dead, the power
supply fan was dead, one of the raid case fans was dead, the CDROM was
dead, the floppy drive was dead, and there was so much dust in the box
that it was amazing that it even worked at all.

A testament to forgotten, stable hardware everywhere, IBM's horrendously
expensive servers which obviously were designed at the time for
bulletproof stability, and an OS which ran for so long that no one even
thought about this box for entirely too long.

The staff at the office told me later they thought it had been making some
strange noises but they stopped, so they thought nothing of it. (Fans
dying, anyone?)

They did think the closet this box was in was getting pretty hot
(apparently the server got almost cherry-red during extended times of high
load) but again, thought nothing of it since performance never dropped....

Anyway, I credit this to fantastic hardware, and the stability of linux.
Since I never had to physically lay my hands on the system to perform
upgrades, I never saw anything wrong with it.

My experience with WinNT (my last windows-based server) indicates that I'd
be reinstalling/patching the OS at least once every 6 months in person, so
we'd have noticed something wrong long ago.

So in its own way, linux helped us put off a capital outlay of several
thousand dollars for quite a few years.

-Dondo

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