Oh the irony!

Just to prove that the universe does have an exquisitely refined sense of humour, my birthday box was inadvertently powered off last night.

Yes this is the box with the BIOS setting of 'ignore power switch', and a nice UPS to power it.

(Insert words starting with 'B' and 'F' here)

Congratulations!

OK today's the day

I will be restarting of course...

Fair call Tony, but let's have the cake before the reboot

While such up-times demonstrate stability and a good power source, there are potential downsides doing this which may or may not hurt you...

1. Obviously no kernel updates - so any kernel security and etc updates not installed...

2. If updates for other than kernel are installed along the way you may be sitting on a time bomb. Some updates such as ssh restart when a rpm update is installed, others do not. What this means is for some of these "others" even though you might have updated code sitting on your disk drive, you are not using it. The older rpm code is still in memory and running, and will continue to do so unless restarted for any reason. When you finally get around to rebooting, all that new unused code suddenly comes into play. Any problems or incompatibilities will finally show up. You may have a hard time relating the problem to an update installed say 6 months prior. Makes problem solving more difficult.

3. Installing a security update may not give you the protection you expect. An example... This is from Redhat for the bash updates last year... (CVE-2014-6271, CVE-2014-7169)

"If your system uses exported Bash functions, restarting affected services is recommended. Affected interactive users may have to re-login, and screen or tmux sessions may need to be restarted.

The Bash update provided to fix these issues changes the names of exported functions in the environment. If a function is exported by the old version of Bash, it is not recognized by newly started Bash processes after the update, and essentially becomes undefined. Restarting the services ensures that the new version of Bash exports functions under the expected name, making it visible again."

You can either investigate all these requirements and ensure every necessary restart happens, or simply reboot and be sure none were missed.

4. Any program that has a show memory leak will gradually 'eat' memory, but not cripple the machine enough for you to notice. However, the amount of swapping could gradually increase slowing the machine down, but again unnoticed unless you regularly monitor...

There may be more but these came to mind... anyway enjoy http://www.angelfire.com/sc2/DrGary123/VirtualBakery.html :-)

Congratulations!

It really is a very stable platform.

This is my best (710 days, 7 hours, 7 minutes!)

https://www.facebook.com/jimscomputerservicesact/photos/a.10151917732220364.875493.10150101888830364/10152794125735364/?type=1