[K12OSN] Thinking about virtualization

[Rob Owens]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2007 at 06:41:27PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Rob Owens wrote:
> 
> >>I have 
> >>one of the RH7.3 based versions that is approaching a 4 year uptime (the 
> >>uptime counter has rolled a couple of times, though).
> >
> >Les, you probably already know this, but you can run the command:
> >
> >who -b
> >
> >and that will tell you the date of the last boot.  I don't think it
> >suffers from the same limitations as the uptime command.
> 
> Maybe on your newfangled box it does:
> 
> # who -b
> who: invalid option -- b
> Try `who --help' for more information.
> 
> I'm pretty sure the last time it was booted was to load this kernel.
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2993373 May 29  2003 vmlinux-2.4.20-18.7 or soon 
> after that.
> 
> I did replace a drive or two, hot-swapping them and rebuilding the raid1 
> mirrors since without shutting down.  Uptime says 433 now, and I think 
> it rolled at 497 twice, so another month+ to go.  It's our main dhcp/dns 
> server, has some web and samba services, and for several of those years 
> was our main email server. And it has a fair-sized CVS repository.
> 
> Normally I wouldn't let something go this long without maintenance but 
> it's pretty well firewalled, the services were all supposed to have been 
> moved to other offices a couple of years ago and at this point it's fun 
> to watch it keep on ticking by itself.  I've pointed the dhcp at newer 
> boot servers but it will still fire up a screen if you vnc to it or do a 
> remote X login.

Oh, I didn't realize the -b option was a recent addition.  For the
record, I'm running Ubuntu 6.10, but I think I've used "who -b" on every
Linux system I've ever run (I've only been doing it for about 3 years
now).

That's a pretty reliable server you've got running there.  I had one
machine that was over 300 days, but a power failure rebooted it (it was
plugged directly into the wall all that time).

-Rob