Re: Maximum uptime 497 days?

From: Oliver Fromme (olli_at_lurza.secnetix.de)
Date: 06/28/04

  • Next message: Roger Raymond: "apache2ssl_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf not starting apache2 on boot" 
    Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 18:44:22 +0200 (CEST)
To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG

    Matt Douhan <matt@fruitsalad.org> wrote:
    > On Monday 28 June 2004 16.03, Oliver Fromme wrote:
    > > Rob <stopspam@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
    > > > By accident I happen to come across this remarkable limit of
    > > > uptime registration for FreeBSD systems. After 497 days, the
    > > > timer jumps to zero again.
    > > >
    > > > 497 days is less than a 1.5 years !
    > >
    > > I'd be very embarrassed to have machines with that a high
    > > uptime -- It means that they haven't been updated for that
    > > a long time and are probably full of security holes. ;-)
    >
    > why ?
    >
    > they may not be public machines at all and be isolated to an environment where
    > security is not the primary concern

    You did notice the smiley, didn't you?

    But seriously, I think that the widespread uptime fetishism
    is somewhat dangerous. People often try hard to avoid
    rebooting machines, just in order to "save their precious
    uptime", even if there are good reasons to reboot.

    A machine with 1.5 years of uptime -- be it in an isolated
    environment or not -- has accumulated the bugs of 1.5 years
    that have been fixed in the latest version of the OS, so to
    speak.

    In fact there is software which I wouldn't want to run even
    if it were outdated for only a few days. Mysql is one such
    example. Every time I looked at the huge list of bugs that
    have been fixed in the latest version, I almost got a heart
    attack. (Changing to PostgreSQL was very healthy.)

    Those are just my opinions, of course, and YMMV.

    I'm very sorry, it got quite off-topic by now.

    Best regards
       Oliver 

    -- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination
of their C programs."
        -- Robert Firth
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