Scott Silva wrote:
How much longer can a system be expected to run? 8+ years at 24/7 is about a half a million hours. Drives are getting old and expensive to replace. Processors are probably slow. Energy use is high. Motherboard capacitors are probably drying up. The systems are past a safe point and are getting closer to the "great e-waste pile in the sky".
I retired a 13 year old DEC AlphaStation 5/266 yesterday... Legacy systems are still doing useful things. You just have to make sure that they're isolated from the outside as they can't be patched or upgraded. (e.g. newer versions of OpenSSH won't compile under Digital UNIX 4.2C)
Steve
P.S. For the record, the DEC box has only ever needed to be shut down for power outages and (in its early life) OS upgrades. It ran 24/7 and never had a hardware fault (and still doesn't). Now that's reliable hardware!
Computer Systems Administrator, E-Mail:-steve@earth.ox.ac.uk Department of Earth Sciences, Tel:- +44 (0)1865 282110 University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, UK. Fax:- +44 (0)1865 272072