This is just to let you know that my server may die soon. It's actually rather surprising it's lasted this long; I bought it in late spring of 2001, and except for a month two years ago, it's been operating 24 hours a day ever since.

It's rebooted three times today. The second time I did it because it was suffering from a half-crash. The first and third were spontaneous.

It's possible that my problem right now is heat-faults. It isn't massively hot today, but that's not the issue. When I first bought the server, I opened it up so I could stuff it full of RAM. It hasn't been open since, and it's been operating in a (ahem) dusty environment ever since. My guess is that the inside is fouled with dust, and likely the cooling fan on the CPU has stopped.

If it gets much more unreliable I'll try to find the courage to open it again and try to blow the dust out. But if it really dies, that won't help any.

Another possibility is that someone is trying to hack me. Sun stopped issuing OS updates for this box years ago, so I'm running old versions of lots of things. Someone did hack this server in August of 2003, and after I noticed it and deloused as much of the stuff they enabled as I could, I set up rules in the firewall to lock down every port that wasn't absolutely necessary. But someone may have found a new hold in my unpatched stuff.

But that can be coped with. Eventually the hardware will bag it. I'm not sure what I'll do if it happens. Most likely I'll go buy a blade server. I have backups of everything important, or at least I can reproduce it without too much trouble.

Anyway, if you've noticed problems loading the top rotation picture today, it was probably because my server was rebooting.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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