Yes, I remember feeling pride in the stability of my systems when I saw a large uptime. I had a server that had 1000 days of uptime, once. Now when I see a large uptime, I'm terrified of what security patches the kernel may be missing!
I still remember the days of servers as pets, rather than cattle, and I was harping about server uptime. A wizened server admin piped in and said he rebooted his servers once a week. Said, if you do it any less frequently, then the odds of catching an error causing change while the person who made said change (possibly himself) is still around and can remember what they did go down precipitously. So, to avoid headaches and potential downtime when it mattered, he would just take servers out of rotation and reboot them, and make sure they came back online.
So true. We have one older, rather large machine in a data center that's been up for.. (checks uptime): 963 days. It has IPMI but at some point something stopped working and now we have to physically go to the data center to restart it. And since we use it every day we can't really afford to lose access to it.
Live Kernel Patching has been around for about 20 years[-1] now.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux[1] and Oracle (Enterprise Linux) Unbreakable Linux[2] both use it as a selling point.
This feature is still a bit ad hoc because, in most setups, rebooting a system isn't a huge burden and is much simpler than using boutique commands to live-patch it.
Live patching exists but it tends to cap out at around a year of updates for any particular kernel version. It's not getting you anywhere near 1000 days.
Currently serving: vm's, dns, email, mx-relay, and multiple shoutcast radio relays 24/7 and some other miscellaneous stuff. Colocation is fun, do I win?
5years; I'm 37 now, I was 32. Life seemed easier then.
I had a box set up as NAT (running amazon linux) when we moved from a local datacenter to AWS in 2012. Shut it down last year. It had not been rebooted. Should have grabbed a screen capture of the uptime. Part of me wanted to leave it to reach 5000 days....
I worked in a place with a lot of Solaris servers with years-long uptime. It would be my job to patch them. Having no idea what config changes that may have happened over the last 3 years which would take effect on boot was always terrifying.
There's also `systemctl soft-reboot` which initiates a userspace-only reboot, which quickly restarts the system without going through the full hardware and kernel initialization process.
I'm glad to see this. Almost 18 years ago I implemented a similar kexec device+memory preservation for a storage vendor. It was done on a Linux kernel of that day, and it had had a memory reservation and handoff protocol between the two kernels to keep some specific PCI device alive, allowing for state restoration at the application side. I'm proud of the fact that the kernel replacement was just under 1 second in execution (after init process optimization) and the whole kernel+app was less than 10 seconds.
Was hoping this would be mentioned. This version of functionality will probably be more universally accessible to all configurations as compared to the soft reboot released in 254:
Soft rebooting was even more exciting for me, but I wasn't able to get it to work on my bluebuild based system (customized universal blue). I haven't tried it in a while though.
I remember installing some new computers for a small shop around y2k, and their NT4 server was acting up a bit when I was adding the new users to the domain controller.
I opened Task Manager to see if any processes was running wild. Imagine my surprise when I saw it had well over 1100 days of uptime!
A Sam's Club in my area has started selling fresh squeezed orange juice. It's quite delicious. (And yes, it's pricey.) I've looked around at many other stores (including places like Whole Foods) and nobody else seems to be doing this.
Yes, the latest chips were very expensive back then, and out of reach for most people who would continue buying new computers with older chips. (As opposed to how most people today buy an iPhone or a Mac or whatever with the latest semiconductor technology.) I got my 25MHz 386 in 1991, over two years after the 486 was announced, and I had one of the fastest computers of anybody in school... for a short time.
Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of mine maintained a list of telnet BBSs and services that was fairly popular at the time. [1]
I was excited earlier this year to discover that Micron (Crucial) was manufacturing 64GB DDR5 "laptop memory" modules, allowing me to pick up a couple in early September to build an ASUS NUC VM server with 128GB of RAM. It was a little hard to get even then, but I found a vendor selling it at a reasonable price.
It worked out so well that I decided to get some more. Needless to say, it went from unavailable to being available for double the price. Now, I guess it won't be available at all in the future. :(
I don't think it was ever common, since earphones weren't that popular until people started calling them "earbuds", but the term was historically used in at least some circles in the U.S. The 1988 Radio Shack catalog [1] seems to mention "earphone" 57 times, including two mono earphone products.
That’s interesting, although that seems to be a different usage than OP mentioned. It seems to be used interchangeably with headphones as it’s also being used to describe cables and jacks.
When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.
I was in this same situation earlier this year with one machine that was using a license attached to my Microsoft account. From what I read online, I thought I was freeing up the license by running "slmgr /upk" and "slmgr /cpky" on the old machine, but I guess not. I was eventually able to get the license transferred to the new machine, but only after a very painful morning of working with an MS support person.
I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.
It's just a matter of buying from the right web page at Microsoft's web site. At least as of June, I was able to buy a license with a traditional license key here:
I don't think it would exactly be "create a fork of this repo", but if a developer invests significant time and effort solving hard problems where the solutions are implemented in the released source, once an LLM model is trained on it, then someone else could quickly and easily have the LLM generate a new program that implements the novel solutions. Whether this is a problem or not may depend on the motivations of the developer, but this potential for IP laundering may very well begin influencing the licenses and methods of distribution that people choose.
(Of course, I suppose at some point AI will be able to analyze and learn from binary executables or obfuscated source...)
