[HN Gopher] The long (after)life of some of our old fileserver h...
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       The long (after)life of some of our old fileserver hardware
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2024-12-16 10:01 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (utcc.utoronto.ca)
 (TXT) w3m dump (utcc.utoronto.ca)
        
       | mattpavelle wrote:
       | I went down a shallow rabbit hole (turns out
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/uptimeporn/ exists ... of course) and
       | found this:
       | 
       | https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fa...
       | 
       | (6430 days as of 2 weeks ago)
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | > 6430 days...
         | 
         | Wow wow wow. I had one that _nearly_ reached 10 years of
         | uptime: a dedicated server at OVH. At some point I just kept it
         | to see how long it 'd stay operational without any reboot.
         | 
         | Now, kids, don't try this at home: of _course_ it wasn 't
         | secure. At some point it got hacked and that's when I cancelled
         | the subscription for that one dedicated server. I still have
         | other servers at OVH.
         | 
         | But yeah: I made it to 3400 days of uptime. Something like
         | that. Don't remember the price of that one server but it wasn't
         | expensive.
         | 
         | Let say it was an... Experiment.
        
       | rkagerer wrote:
       | Nothing wrong with using old hardware until it dies (provided you
       | have appropriate redundancy, of course).
        
         | chasil wrote:
         | I am still running an HP K380 server with the HP-UX 10.20
         | operating system. It has 250mhz risc CPUs and takes 220V power.
         | 
         | This server is likely on the far side of "[nothing] wrong," and
         | we had it turned off and ready to e-waste.
         | 
         | However, the effort to rewrite the code that runs on this
         | machine had some surprising setbacks, and I had to wheel it
         | back in. It will likely be here after I'm gone.
        
           | indrora wrote:
           | The way you push to migrate (even moving to a QEMU-hppa
           | binary emulation environment) is the following equation:
           | 
           | cost(maintain) is the cost of keeping the system running as
           | it stands right now, with the risk of 100% "it's gone" loss.
           | 
           | cost(recover) is the cost of rebuilding what you have from
           | wreckage, including any monetary loss from SLAs.
           | 
           | cost(port) is the cost of operating plus the cost of ensuring
           | compatibility at some level (or just "rebuilding it for
           | functional equality"), with the inherent risk of Second
           | System Syndrome.
           | 
           | when cost(port) + cost(maintain) < cost(recover) by some
           | factor (say, cost(port)^2 ) then it's time to port the system
           | in-place after documenting its behavior as closely as you
           | can. If you have source, that's great -- it's a UNIX system,
           | you should be able to dredge most of it over and might need
           | to patch in parts here and there.
        
           | rbanffy wrote:
           | Donate it to a computer museum instead. It's an interesting
           | machine, from a dead lineage.
           | 
           | Or sell it on eBay. HP/UX boxes tend to be expensive, for
           | reasons I can't really understand
        
           | kjs3 wrote:
           | I have, of all things, a logic analyzer that runs HP/UX 10.20
           | (HP 16702B). Of course, it's not on unless I'm actively using
           | it, so I don't have to be concerned about the power
           | consumption, unlike a K-box.
        
       | liminalsunset wrote:
       | https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/HowWeSellS...
       | 
       | Perhaps the most interesting (though sort of irrelevant) part
       | from a linked page on the site is that "cloud" storage is being
       | sold as a one-time cost. A great deal (depending on price) if you
       | ask me!
        
       | devsda wrote:
       | > This particular server is a "bring your own disks" storage
       | server for people who want bulk storage that's more limited in
       | several ways than disk space on our fileservers, but (much)
       | cheaper than what we normally charge
       | 
       | Just curious. Is there a commercial version of such service ?
       | Something between cloud and co-location.
        
       | virtualwhys wrote:
       | 8 years and still going on a Dell R430 rack server (8X SSD in
       | RAID 10, 2X Xeon CPU, ...)
       | 
       | One of the drives failed last year, but used one of the hot
       | spares on standby to put out the fire as it were.
       | 
       | Amazing longevity, perhaps I've just gotten lucky while avoiding
       | obscene 24/7 cloud instance costs. It will die at some point,
       | much like the HN server storing these very words.
        
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       (page generated 2024-12-17 23:01 UTC)