Why I Love Linux

For a number of years I have maintained servers at the Boise office of SolutionPro. I am currently reducing from three machines to one. They provide wonderful service, and I have had incredible uptime. For example the evening before I shut the three machines down I took a look at my uptime on them.

All three machines have gone over 2 years since the last time they were rebooted. This means that the operating system must be stable enough to handle running that long, and SolutionPro's power has not been lost in even longer. The values are 808 days for Lessa, and 786 days for both Corana and Shara. That is 2 years + 70 days for Lessa and 2 years + 56 days for the others.

Contrast that with Windows, which requires you to reboot for so many things, including keeping your system stable. I admit Windows XP has finally allowed me to go a month or two between reboots, which beats the week maximum I saw with Windows 9X. I realize Windows Server versions are more reliable than the desktop versions I use, but still how many Windows machines do you have that you only reboot to upgrade the operating system every couple of years.

This uptime is only slightly amazing, I've gone over a year between reboots twice before. This is only the operating system uptime, along with many of the utilities that come with it. I regularly update the server software on the machines, but this does not require a reboot.

I will update from SuSE 9.3 to Open SuSE 10.2, but 9.3 was fully supported until April 30th 2007. I pushed it a little because of the uncertainty of what I was going to do with the business. Now I have until November 30, 2008 before this operating system version will reach its end of life.