This goes for both my personal and work laptops. Both have been running some version of Debian for the last ten years. For the previous four/five years, I've been on Debian Sid, and I may run into an issue about every other year that requires me to use timeshift to go back to yesterday's OS backup.
With the proper backup and automation strategies in place, I do not see a point in not doing a reinstall periodically. It definitely gives me peace of mind knowing I can be back online and 98% percent functional in under an hour in most cases on just about every device in the house.
It is also a good test of disaster recovery.
By wiping your devices and doing a fresh install, you catch hidden assumptions.
The top 500 entries on that list are almost guaranteed to be mainframes.
> The computer system that has been in continual operation for the longest period is the Computer Command System (CCS) onboard NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft. This pair of interlinked computers have been in operation since the spacecraft's launch on 20 August 1977. As of 29 October 2020, the CCS has been running for 43 years 70 days.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/635980-lo...
That's very interesting. Your comment got me searching and I found a link here on HN: "Stratus: Servers that won’t quit – The 24 year running computer" with quite a discussion (123 comments) on the topic:
With Ubuntu I was afraid to change anything because I might break things and not know how to get back to a working state.
With Nix, you are always on a fresh, pristine system, because the file system is mostly read-only and an exact reflection of what's in your config. It's impossible to get crufty.
$ w
15:25 up 725 days, 6:06, 1 user, load averages: 1.31 1.21 1.30
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT
andrew s000 192.168.1.200 15:25 - w
I have all my machines plugged into UPSes and we have a standby whole home generator. So the only way any of my machines shut down is if I do it explicitly.
Office at home certainly beats datacenter hosted but by 5x? Not sure... ; )
(I got the generator not just for uptimes haha. Got it because we get a lot of outages and we were losing a lot of spoiled goods from our fridge. About half our neighborhood has generators of some kind.)
Also, a deep freeze that is the top loading style is best for preventing spoilage, especially if you keep all the available space full of bags or bottles of water.
I also have a makeshift "whole home" backup generator, 11.5kW/9.5kW peak on gas/propane, but only because i have a well, and the pump draws something like 4.5kW when running. The extra headroom allows me to run my 5 ton HVAC and have running water and lights and everything.
We also have a hot tub and we're in New England. We were worried about a multi-day outage resulting in the tub freezing in the winter. A low probability event, but one that was conceivable.
Both the fridge and the hot tub problems can indeed be resolved with something less than our 16kW generac. The hot tub really just needs a small space heater to be put inside the cabinet to prevent the pipes from freezing. And as you say, fridges don't use much power. So powering those two things (and our upright freezer) would need a pretty small power source.
So absolutely, we overdid it a little. But it's super nice having it kick on when we get an outage. Otherwise I'll be playing the, "is it really worth going out in the snow, lugging out a generator and getting it running if the outage is just an hour?" game. There's also the issue of maintenance, which I'm... not greatest at to be honest. (I have a 2 year old at home and time is just absolutely slipping by. It's hard enough to keep up with normal chores.) The standby generator does a weekly test, so we know whether it's actually working or not.
Yeah, definitely a bit of a luxury, but worth it for us. :-)
I am not an expert on generators though. If you're not looking to maintain it yourself, I'd say the most important bit is going with people that have good customer service. Which depends on your area. Might be Generac, might be Kohler.
See also: https://old.reddit.com/r/Generator/
I very rarely use the mac mini. Basically just for testing. So at some point, it got to a crazy uptime and now I'm purposely trying to see how long I can go haha.
In theory the battery in UPS will eventually need to be replaced. Otherwise I don't see it ever losing power given that I have a generator
Pair that with a slightly higher (but still low overall) tech LD_PRELOAD libc shim so it hides itself and you got something just stealthy enough that you wouldn't find it if you don't look for it.
Remember, the easiest privilege escalation is aliasing sudo and patience.
I still like it that way: a good old write-once DVD, checksum'ed, and a brand new install. Ideally on new hardware but that's not always the case.
Isn't this a huge problem? Distro-preference/upgrade patterns aside, What's latest in the detection of a root-kit in the Linux desktop of an unsuspecting home user before they realize that they've been pwned(i.e. data exfiltration, ransomware etc.)? Assuming they aren't running any real-time scanners(Even if they want, Is there any real choice apart from ClamAV?)
By installing from scratch at every new stable (or unstable) release, I get rid of a lot of potential security issues.
Now as an anecdote: ten years with the same install is nice but... I've got a dedicated server at OVH with 3400 days of uptime. You read that correctly. Nearly ten years of uptime. Once in a while I give temporary ssh access to people here and there just so they can type "uptime" and see. Kids: don't try this at home. Yes, it's insecure (although there's a firewall and only the SSH port open). No, it doesn't do much nor is it very useful. But it's fun to think I own one of the computer in the world with the biggest uptime.
I plan to kill it once it reaches ten years \o/