Check this out:

andrew@littlesvr:~$ uptime
00:20:16 up 730 days, 15:13,  1 user,  load average: 0.57, 0.22, 0.11

At 4AM this morning it was 730 days, that’s exactly two years!

The server would have been up for about 6 years if I didn’t decide once to upgrade the hardware, once to upgrade Slackware, and once to be hacked :) Ok that last one wasn’t a conscious decision, and it may happen again since I haven’t ever figured out what the vulnerability was.

Yeah, this little box has been running for this long, and yes, it does have spiderwebs on it. I didn’t take them off when I saw them because that is so cool and since I have no fans they really don’t cause any trouble.

The server is sitting on a UPS that I bought years ago. Today I tested it by cutting the power, expecting that it will die immediately. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the server (and DSL modem and hub) were still on after the 5 minute battery test. I didn’t want to test it for longer than that because I remember the spec for the UPS said 8 minutes, and I wonder if maybe a year from now I’ll be celebrating a 3-year uptime anniversary :)

Maybe in a year or two I’ll replace it with a faster, fancier, even smaller Arm box like one of those Chris Tyler is playing with. But for now I have no need.

Unfortunately my Slackware upgrade came with an Apache upgrade which means the log formats are different between the two periods, so I can’t say how much data has been transferred, but this webaliser screenshot will give you an idea of what’s typical:

(for the observant ones: legrand-sw is the workstation where I ran webaliser on the littlesvr logs)

That’s roughly 240GB of data uploaded per year (caching is on by default), and 9600 unique visitors per year.

I think it’s pretty good for a tiny hobby web server on a residential ADSL connection serving hobby content :)

And of course this is not just a web server but also my email server, which I don’t have stats for but it’s the only email I really use. With any luck it will also become an LDAP server, if I can set it up so that it’s compatible with Thunderbird and easily updateable.

Long live Slackware!