What was the longest uptime you have ever reached with a Linux server?

wii747

uptime
12:49:23 up 1269 days, 13:31, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.19, 0.43

macguy

gemini_geek

04:22:56 up 1514 days, 4:17, 1 user, load average: 0.39, 0.29, 1.75

Hetzner vps, cancelled last month, since they increased prices, this server served well all those years

cxg

Besides Ubuntu is there any other vendor that offers kernel live patching for free?

fatchan

~ # uptime
 23:58:37 up 527 days,  8:53,  load average: 0.17, 0.08, 0.07

OpenWRT box at home with UPS. Historically OVH vps have been extremely reliable also. Multi years uptime.

valk

This has been up since forever and still runs in production (yes I love doing production on outdated software)

[root@nl ~]# cat /etc/os-release && uptime
NAME="AlmaLinux"
VERSION="9.5 (Teal Serval)"
ID="almalinux"
ID_LIKE="rhel centos fedora"
VERSION_ID="9.5"
PLATFORM_ID="platform:el9"
PRETTY_NAME="AlmaLinux 9.5 (Teal Serval)"
ANSI_COLOR="0;34"
LOGO="fedora-logo-icon"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:almalinux:almalinux:9::baseos"
HOME_URL="https://almalinux.org/"
DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://wiki.almalinux.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.almalinux.org/"

ALMALINUX_MANTISBT_PROJECT="AlmaLinux-9"
ALMALINUX_MANTISBT_PROJECT_VERSION="9.5"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="AlmaLinux"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION="9.5"
SUPPORT_END=2032-06-01
 21:09:40 up 691 days, 13:27,  1 user,  load average: 0.83, 0.82, 1.06

PuDLeZ

For my personal, I only got between 1 and 2 years but have since migrated to automated patching and then depending on the use case, automatic reboots or alerts me about a host needing to be rebooted.

Now, at one of the companies I worked for, when I first joined, the lowest uptime was like 1200 with the longest (that I at least personally witnessed) was a little over 3500 on a zLinux host. I remember that because my mind was blown that in a few/several months it was going to be 10 years. I joined that company at the right time because all the old leadership from the dark times (what they called it) left and the new ones actually stood up to the business side saying we need to patch/reboot. That was a "fun" ordeal that eventually we got them to agree to quartely. Then once businesses getting hacked started being big news stories, they (the business side) finally agreed to monthly and out of schedule patching if something was that critical.

ralf

(deleted my claim about Solaris because I can't find any evidence for it online)

bozolover99

My Reliablesite dedicated server has had periods of uptime around 3 years,

an OVH dedicated server in Vint Hill for 1.5 years (as long as I have owned it),

Greencloud vps in VIrginia 2 years, never goes down.

My Netcup (Virginia) vps's rarely go down other than the occasional famous Netcup network sputter (few secs to a min).

noisycode

Used to be about 1K days. But lately, CVEs are everywhere thanks to LLMs, so I have to keep upgrading patching and rebooting servers.

It's driving me mad.

lc475

One of our Hetzner dedicated servers at work, just passed 8 years of uptime, running Debian 8.9.

11:09:35 up 2924 days, 17:49, 1 user, load average: 0.47, 0.85, 1.00

forest

@cxg said:
Besides Ubuntu is there any other vendor that offers kernel live patching for free?

Livepatches are only able to mitigate some vulnerabilities, and are only released for the most severe ones. They're a stop-gap to give you time to delay updates until the next maintenance period, but they do not keep your kernel secure. You will not receive livepatch fixes for moderate severity vulnerabilities, and you only need a few of those to chain together a full-fledged LPE.

TimboJones

@ralf said:

@TimboJones said:
Notes to self all the users running critical services on insecure servers

You're making a lot of assumptions about criticality of these machines!

Yes. Office UPS is 3-5 years typically so to exceed 7 years suggests additional resources or redundancy to provide stable power that entire time. In addition, this is old hardware that if it served no purpose is costing money in terms of power and space real estate.
Lastly, the length of time and old OS suggests pain to update or replace, causing decent downtime once it does fail.