Distro comparison

[Rich Braun]

josephc at etards.net wrote:
> That's not to say I have a FreeBSD box with more than
> a year between reboots. In fact, people who boast about that are
> probably running the most insecure systems not named Windows.

True enough about system security on general-purpose systems.  However, if you
define the system's functionality narrowly enough, you can push Linux to long
uptime.

My file server is going strong:
  % uptime ; uname -a
  5:11pm  up 416 days,  4:33,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.18, 0.18
  Linux summit.ci.net 2.2.12-20 #1 Mon Sep 27 10:40:35 EDT 1999 i686 unknown

Yup, that's a *1999*-vintage kernel running since summer '02.  It's not
especially insecure, though, because it only runs Samba and a backup NTP
server.  So long as that old kernel will keep running whatever security-patch
level of these apps is required, I don't need to reboot.  RAID also
contributes to long uptime.

-rich