NerdLog

My first home UNIX box, long ago... A PDP 11/23+ (Q-BUS rocks baby) which required me to unplug everything in the apartment before I powered it up, particularly the two 5 meg RL01 disks and the 10 meg RL02. In those days we would reboot a UNIX box which had been up for a week, we might not have known why, but we knew the price of not doing so. Fast-forward some 20+years. Last year my FreeBSD box which serves xyz.com and many other domains, rebooted for reasons that I never quite understood. I was miffed, the previous reboot had only been three years prior. The same box (on which I'm now typing) has since only been up for less than 8 months. I find myself resentfull of the fact that I've a new server built and configured, ready to replace it, after all, who has any business rebooting a box with less than a year of uptime? What do they think, that I run windows? In the early days we used to not run UNIX on desktopish boxen because it (in the form of SCO Xenix 286) was such a resource hog. MS-DOS rules baby, who needs more than 640K anyhow? The box I mentioned above runs a 700MHz celeron with all of 512meg of memory. Try running windows XP (or god forbid vista) on that. Funny how our perspectives change with time.