On Call The working week can be burdensome, so each Friday morning The Register tries to lighten the load by bringing you a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you let go of tech support stories that weigh on your memory.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Bobby" who told us about an old friend of his who he suggested we refer to as "Peanut."
Peanut was a Mac tech by trade, and a Linux user by inclination.
Those affiliations combined into a fanatical appetite for unbroken uptime.
Which is how Bobby came into this story.
"The people Peanut worked for were moving to new premises, and he didn’t want to lose the 400-plus days of uptime on his mail server," Bobby explained.
"So he came up with a scheme to move the server and the UPS between buildings." Peanut, who was very strong, got the job of carrying the UPS. Bobby carried the smaller and lighter server.
Peanut's employer didn't want or need the server to remain online. Indeed, during the move it wasn't connected to anything and therefore couldn’t send or receive mail. But the somewhat daft scheme worked and the server did continue running.
"It all went really well and we got the UPS and the mail server into the new building without any mishaps," Bobby told On Call. Peanut therefore preserved his uptime streak.
But while Peanut kept the server alive during the office move, he lost track of how he managed the entire fleet of boxes under his care.
“He phoned me several days later and explained he had been logged into several Linux boxes using the same CLI. Then he needed to reboot one of them to complete a package update but didn’t realize that was the mail server.”
Peanut therefore shut down the box he’d tried so hard to keep running.
Have you attempted extreme uptime elongation? If so, click here to let us know about your schemes, so we can share them in a future edition of On Call. ®
Source: The register