I should blog about this one day but... I have a server at OVH (not affiliated to them) which, at this point, I keep only for fun. It has 3162 days of uptime

I should blog about this one day but... I have a server at OVH (not affiliated to them) which, at this point, I keep only for fun. It has 3162 days of uptime as I type this. 3 162 days. That's 8 years+ of uptime. Does it have the traffic of Amazon? No. Is it secure? Very likely not: it's running an old Debian version (Debian 7, which came out in, well, 2013). It only has one port opened though, SSH. And with quite a hardened SSH setup at that. I installed all the security patches I could install without rebooting it (so, yes, I know, this means I didn't install all the security patches for some required rebooting). This server is, by now, a statement. It's about how stable Linux can be. It's about how amazingly stable Debian is. It's also about OVH: at times they had part of their datacenter burn (yup), at times they had full racks that had to be moved/disconnected. But somehow my server never got affected. It may have happened that at one point OVH had connectivity issues but my server went down. I "gave back" many of my servers I didn't need anymore. But this one I keep just because... I still use it, but only as an additional online/off-site backup where I send encrypted backups. It's not as if it gets zero use: I typically push backups to it daily. They're only backups, they're encrypted. Even if my server is "owned" by some bad guys, the damage he could do is limited. Never seen anything suspicious on it though. I like to do "silly" stuff like that. Like that one time I solve LCS35 by computing for about four years on commodity hardware at home. I think it's about time I start to do some archeology on that server, to see what I can find. Apparently I installed Debian 7 on it in mid-october 2013. I've created a temporary user account on it, which at times I've handle the password (before resetting it) to people just so they could SSH in and type: "uptime". It is a thing of beauty. Eight. Years. Of. Uptime.