Gatekeeper and Lucky 7’s
After over five years on the job, my server, gatekeeper.hartetec.com was decommissioned. Gatekeeper was a Pentium-II 266MHz with 192MB of RAM, two 2.something GB hard drives, and ran RedHat Linux 7.2 with a later (2.4.18) kernel. This machine started out life at UC Berkeley in 1998, and I bought it and about five similar machines in 2002 in a pallet of surplus computer equipment.
I installed it as an all-purpose gateway/firewall/ftp/ssh/telnet/http/sendmail server, and it ran 24/7/365 for over five years. It was connected to an uninterruptible power supply, and even survived several of California’s “rolling blackouts” without going down. One day, I checked the uptime log on the system, and it was at something like 45 days. I knew the system was up for more than a year at that time, and there was no evidence of a reboot, so I did some Google searching, and found that Linux’ uptime counter wraps after 497 days. From time to time, this machine also served as a TFTP server, DNS server, and even a MOP (DECNET) server for bootloading Vaxen and other DEC systems. For that reason specifically, I installed a DEC “Tulip” network card, which had something special about it (I forgot what exactly) with regard to MAC address filtering.
During the week of July 4th, it was about 105′F in our area, and gatekeeper, which was not in a controlled environment (it was on a shelf in the garage) apparently suffered some overheating damage, but kept on running without incident. About a week later, I could hear “beeping” from the 2nd floor of the house. Upon furhter investigation, I found that the beeping was coming from the garage, and in fact was the BIOS telling me that the system had overheated. Sure enough, the power supply fan had siezed up, and as a result of that, there was no video, no nothing, except the smell of melting plastic. After cooling the system down and replacing the power supply, I booted it back up. After fscking for about 15 minutes, the system came up, and ran for about 10 hours. Then it crashed again, then ran for anothe few days and kept repeating the crashes. I feared that the hard drives had suffered permanent damage due to overheating. Bearing noise had become a problem, and every time I rebooted the system, fsck would delete about 50-100 files. So I figured the system was on its last legs.
Last night at 12:00AM, gatekeeper’s replacement, pollux.hartetec.com came on-line. Pollux is a 1U rackmount server that I bought at Weird Stuff about two years ago or so. I had always envisioned it as a replacement for gatekeeper, but never had the heart to replace gatekeeper while it was running so reliably. So now even Pollux is outdated before it was even commissioned. It’s a 1.2GHz Pentium III/Celeron, and is now running Fedora Core 7. Hopefully this will be my next lucky 7 server to run for the next five years (or more.)