It's an EC2 nano instance that's used only as a monitor for a few services that are running inside my VPN. It has served me well over all these years!
EDIT: before everyone starts screaming about "security":
It’s not internet facing and no port is opened, all it does is fire up a notification if/when something doesn’t reply.
Even in the unlikely scenario that someone gain access to it that means that my VPN is already compromised, and I’ve got bigger problems to worry about.
It's not internet facing and no port is opened, all it does is fire up a notification if/when something doesn't reply.
Even in the unlikely scenario that someone gain access to it (nobody did in the last ~4 years) that means that my VPN is already compromised and I've got bigger problems to worry about.
In the kind of tale any aspiring BOFH would be able to dine out on for months, the University of North Carolina has finally located one of its most reliable servers - which nobody had seen for FOUR years.
One of the university's Novell servers had been doing the business for years and nobody stopped to wonder where it was - until some bright spark realised an audit of the campus network was well overdue.
According to a report by Techweb it was only then that those campus techies realised they couldn't find the server. Attempts to follow network cabling to find the missing box led to the discovery that maintenance workers had sealed the server behind a wall.
Personally I am shutting down my server in the midnights to make it relax for a bit. #MentallySupportingOurHomeServers
Butt yes, I still agree with the comments above, even if theserver is not directly connected on Internet, upgrading is mandstory nowadays. Bots are everywhere, especially nowadays with all of these AI tools.
Now for a relevant comment. I used to love those high uptime values as well, but I'll echo the security sentiments of others in this thread. On the other hand, as you said it's not public facing, so not as big a deal. I still think it's kinda cool!
Many years ago working for a monitoring software company someone had found a bug in the uptime monitoring rules where they reset after a year.
It was patched and I upgraded one client and their whole Solaris plant immediately went red and alerted. They told me to double it to two years and some stuff was still alerting.
They just said they’d try to get around to rebooting it, but it was all stable.
Everywhere else I’ve worked enforces regular reboots.
I think I got up to 300 or so days on my old Athlon XP Gentoo server. I have "upgraded" since then and my current server can't go more than 2 days. I have an arduino connected to the motherboards reset button pin that resets it whenever the bash script that communicates with the arduino stops running but even that somehow still crashes at least once a week and needs manual intervention.