Uptime

I know people who will laugh at me but I am positive Windows gets a really bad rap on uptime. I was in crunch mode recently and hammering on my 2000 Server desktop at the office. I’d actually terminal service into the machine on my desk (while at my desk) so when I had to leave I could just disconnect the session. Later I’d terminal service from home over a VPN and pick up right where I left off.

At one point I began thinking it had been a long time since I logged out of this terminal service session, much less rebooted the computer. I grabbed an UPTIME utility and saw it was 89 days since the last reboot.

Around day 98 my co-workers began to become annoyed with me talking about hitting “the big 1 – zero – zero”. One person threatened to come into the office some night and power the machine down.

The real problem started around 110 days of uptime. I received an internal CD writer drive for the machine. I wanted to see how long I could keep the machine up, so I hid the drive under my desk.

Around day 120 I was getting very nervous. A co-worker started asking if I was ever going to use the drive. When working at a startup you can’t just leave unused resources laying around. People will scavenge any piece of extra equipment that isn’t tied down, bolted, duct taped, and labeled clearly with your name in permanent ink. You can’t even leave a spare CAT5 cable laying around much less a CD burner. After some ceremony, I powered down, opened the case, and installed the drive.

I’ll never know how long the machine could have gone – but I do know current uptime is 32 days, 10 hours, 55 minutes, and 16 seconds. Still a long way to go to catch up to the servers with the longest uptime on the net.