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nixCraft 🐧

In a big, empty room filled with computers, there's an old Sun Solaris server sitting under a desk no one remembers. It has an uptime of over 20 years. Every day, a cron job runs on a forgotten Solaris box, generating critical financial data everyone uses to make retirement investments. Even though no one thinks about this box, everyone needs it & fetches that data using FTP. It works all alone, making sure people can retire comfortably. It's like a secret helper, quietly working in the cold.

JPMorgan Chase & Co charges $10k for that data presented in nice PDF and Excel format. Life is not fair, I guess.

@nixCraft

Whoever once made the Choice for that box certainly did something right.

Because writing for cloud infrastructures and nowadays Win ensures whatever you do is going to be history way earlier and for sure wont run for decades without changes.

(Had the same at a previous employer. It was a OS/2 box…. alas virtualized one day and of course very isolated…)

@nixCraft previous employer that one Sun box was a DNS server that had been declared "obsolete" by the network group but us Sysadmins couldn't bear to bring down the box with 15 year uptime so it stayed in the rack. That was 20 years ago and they outsourced their IT so it's probably gone by now, but I like to think it's still sitting there waiting for internal DNS requests.

@nixCraft This reminds me of a SunOS 4 box we had to keep around because of a poorly thought out decision by a customer… they burned its IP onto the CD game media.

@nixCraft having been global chief architect of 2 banks, I feel there is nothing wrong with that ... eventually you redo that and put into a modern platform. But the roi for changes is incredibly bad and the logic doesn't change over decades anyway

@nixCraft The only person who knows about it is a wizened janitor given a sacred task by the system engineer who set it up. Somehow, every year he oils the machine in specific places and venerates it with the proper chants and incense to appease the machine spirit and feed it sacred smoke.

@oceaniceternity @nixCraft Civilizations will rise and fall, glacial ice sheets and tropical rain forests will advance and retreat, continents will drift as the stars shift into strange new constellations, and somewhere an obscure priesthood will gather every midsummer eve to sacrifice a black goat over the SCSI cable that promises every pious man an RV to drive around the legendary lost kingdom of Flori-duh after retirement.

Still Solaris marches tirelessly on, unto the 64 bit time_t epoch.

@oceaniceternity
Then one day, he retires or "made redundant" and the countdown begins for the next global financial crisis.
@nixCraft

@nixCraft that speaks a lot about the server and the OS and stupid business model Sun microsystems had.

@nixCraft When I was working at Sun, the most likely reason for my desktop computer crashing was a power outage.

@nixCraft right next to it is a Netware server running a 3270 gateway connected to a modem bank...

@nixCraft

Okay, I can't do 10 years. But I can do…

@nixCraft … and this isn't even fiction: there are plenty of forgotten boxes, some of which now run serious risks because the sysadmins are approaching retirement age or have been "outsourced".

@jpmens

@cynicalsecurity
Over a decade ago I was doing work with a now-defunct CDN in moving servers around and turning off old machines that weren't doing anything. A couple hours into the maintenance it was realized that the company's website was not working. After engineers realized their website wasn't running on their CDN we had to go through a stack of old 1U machines (now in a stack on the floor) that "weren't doing anything" to literally find the website.
@nixCraft @jpmens

@nixCraft I'm a massive fan of proper hardware and the race to the cloud felt like a mistake to me but I always worry when I hear about huge uptimes on these things. It just makes me think, if it ever does go down, it's probably never coming back up.

@nixCraft It takes slices of a penny for every transaction. It's the world's richest computer.

@nixCraft I got a call 2 years after I retired from an ex colleague, concerning a Linux server I'd setup 10 years previously which researchers ran or had run virtual machines on asking if it was still in use. By then I couldn't know.