500 days uptime...

[Paul Lussier]

Or: "What's an order of magnitude between friends?"

So, my desktop (which has no UPS, by the way) has been up for more
than 500 days.  Evidently, the linux kernel doesn't like going more
than 500 days without being rebooted :)
   
    $ uptime
    09:44:41 up 5 days, 21:38, 50 users,  load average: 1.10, 1.36, 1.03
   
   Hmm, that's funny, my system's only been up for 5 days?  I know
   I've been logged in for longer than that:
   
   $ ps auxww |grep screen
   pll    4509  0.0  0.2   6324  1060 ?        S     2009   0:55 xscreensaver
   
   Cool, not only has it only been up for 5 days, but I won't be starting
   xscreensaver for another 2 years!

I remember looking at uptime a few weeks ago, and it was around 475
days.  I was pretty psyched I could get to that level of uptime on a
desktop system :)

For those that care, this is a Dell GX250, which is somewhere between
5-7 years old, running a 2.4.27 based kernel.  Prior to the last
reboot it was installed with some version of Debian woody, but has
apt-get run countless times to upgrade it to being a mostly, but not
quite entirely etch-based system.

I *really* need to upgrade to X.org, but fear I can't do so without a
reboot, and based on the age of the hardware, I'm afraid to do so.  It
really might never come back :(

While uptimes like this are not uncommon to Linux, or UNIX in general,
it's usually a server with that kind of uptime.  Not a desktop, and
certainly not without a UPS!

What's the uptime record for desktops without a UPS?
(I wonder what the Windows uptime record is ? :)
-- 
Seeya,
Paul