500 days uptime...

[Shawn K. O'Shea]

This is a pretty well known kernel bug. Sounds like you are still on a
2.4 kernel, because this was fixed in 2.5 (and later 2.4's). The
kernel used to base uptime on an internal counter called the jiffies
counter, which overflows at ~497 days uptime.

http://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/08/16/linux-uptime-reset/

-Shawn

On 10/15/07, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>