6 ms·
I'll share an anecdote along the same lines, albeit much smaller in scale: In 2004 an acquaintance asked me for help with sharing an Internet connection to the
by daneel_w 6y ago
I'll share an anecdote along the same lines, albeit much smaller in scale:
In 2004 an acquaintance asked me for help with sharing an Internet connection to the residents of his condominium after he had failed getting a common router/switch solution to work. The router was not playing ball unless all clients presented themselves in one and the same subnet, which prompted the unmanaged switch to pass traffic directly between the ports, and that was a no-no for historic reasons relating to Windows and its malware of the time. So I repurposed an old anno 1999 ATX motherboard with a mix of Ethernet cards - the board offered 6 PCI ports and the condominium has 5 residents - 256 MB of RAM, and a low-power passively cooled Pentium III to act as router and switch in one, running OpenBSD with some dhcpd(8) and pf(4) to manage clients and traffic.
16 years later this set-up is still in use 24/7 due to ISPs claiming logistic problems preventing them from installing gateway equipment in the building. It serves a VDSL2 line of 60/20 Mbit/s coming in over the POTS. At its peak the computer had 6 years of uptime. It is still running OpenBSD 3.5 due to poor #OPSEC on my behalf.
- paco3346 6y agoGood lord, 6 years? I've had some managed switches with nearly 2 years uptime but 6 is just asinine. I assume it was on a UPS? If so, how did the battery healthy stay usable? Or was the electrical grid there just super dependable?
- daneel_w 6y agoThe computer used to sit behind a diminutive UPS, though I don't think it was ever fully discharged; off the top of my head I can only recall two brief power outages here in the last 20 years.
- mkl 6y agoSix years without a power cut doesn't seem too surprising. Was "asinine" the word you meant there? It doesn't make sense to me in context.
- jmnicolas 6y ago> Six years without a power cut doesn't seem too surprising. It depends where you live and / or you might not notice them if they happen at night. Even in France which is supposed to be a first world country I experience a couple power cuts every month (twice at night this week-end, it killed my tile generation and corrupted my filesystem on my OSM server). I probably should invest in a UPS instead of complaining on HN !
- fian 6y agoIt also depends on the status of your local grid/substation. My university was on the same local distribution as a nearby hospital. The hospital had special status for receiving power, for obvious reasons. So in the 10 odd years I spent doing undergrad and post grad studies there was only ever 1 brief power outage during a thunderstorm. Meanwhile nearby suburbs probably averaged 2 power outages per year, typically for a few hours at most.
- mkl 6y agoWow, I thought power in France would be great. I'm in NZ, and I'm sure I've gone six years without a power cut. I have a PC that's always on (no UPS), so I'd definitely notice.
- wyoh 6y agoThe power in France is great, I never heard anyone have so many cuts. The only cuts I encountered is from falling trees due to lots of wind the winter. Otherwise I can count the number of cuts on two hands for the past twenty years.
- flukus 6y agoOn the other side of the Tasman they're pretty common due to summer storms. In Queensland having candles ready when we sat down for dinner was an almost daily occurrence some months, the PC and just about everything else would be turned off and unplugged by then. The best nights were when the power went early and we had an emergency Barbecue. Over the years it got more reliable but I'm not sure if that was universal or just my specific area getting a lot more built up.
- Kiro 6y agoWhere do you live? I don't think I've had a power outage in like 20 years. (Yes, I know it happens on a daily basis in some countries.)
- el-salvador 6y agoThird world country here... I live in a block with a bad circuit, and we have brief <5min outages at least once a week. I dont like it because it makes my microwave's clock unusable. Neighbours one block away don't have that many outages.
- C1sc0cat 6y agowhy wasn't the router playing ball ?
- messe 6y agoFWIW. 256MB should handle the latest OpenBSD, with little issue (although an upgrade to 512MB wouldn't hurt if possible). The main issue is going to be pf.conf syntax. OpenBSD has become a little bit more RAM intensive on boot recently due to relinking shared libraries and the kernel to randomize them (Think .o level ASLR), but 256MB IIRC can handle it. Boots will be slow, but if you've dealt with 6 year uptimes in the past that probably won't lead to much of an issue.
- cptskippy 6y agoI worked at an Insurance Broker ~1998 as the assistant to the CIO who was also the only network engineer. Which I guess made me the PFY. We use to deploy those mini tower eMachines to the staff, but we'd rip out the WinModems and replace them with a NIC. So we had a box of about 100 WinModems collecting dust in the corner. The newer machines came with 20+GB HDDs so we'd swap those out with smaller 4-8GB HDDs we had laying around. At some point a 1800 number got decommissioned but the local number and internal distribution tree were still active in the PBX. I ended up taking a decomissioned IVR and swapping out the Retorrex boards for WinModems and configuring it as dialup internet service and used a bunch of those large HDDs to host an FTP Server on it. I left sometime in 2005 but my makeshift dialup ISP was still active as late as 2008 and there was an extensive collection of DIVX movies still on the FTP server.