Life before your eyes

Hopefully it is not a tragedy. I am rebooting my server after more than 374 days of uptime. Not complete uptime, since sometimes I do reboot the webserver command (lighttpd) every once in a while. But in fact, this computer has been alive, consuming some amount of electricity, power, work from somewhere else, for the last 6 minutes, 21 hours, nine days, and one full year as of writing this. In a few minutes time, power will be cutoff for a few seconds, and then, back to business!

But what is it with computers and rebooting, that we must do it all the time. It feels kind of essential. We’ve built this persistence around memory, hard disks, solid-state drives. The files will be there, intact, thanks to the error-correction built-in to file systems and physical devices. Pretty weird, right? That you can kill all the power, turn on again and it will work almost exactly the same as before. Or maybe your error will be fixed, because of some weird condition in the code that specifically made it act that way.

Oh, computers, persistence is key. But the persistence of the reboot is there. It has stood time. It is still advisable to reboot your computer. To turn it on and off and see if it works. Or just for the good of the device, right? I always turn off my computer when I am not using it. Even if I will use it in 30 minutes, I will turn it off. I’ve been told to do that. Some people like my sister do not. She leaves it on ‘suspend’. She just closes the lid and lets it be. Some other people do to. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Is it bad? It’s their device after all, not mine. Their decision. I am unsure if it’s actually better or worse, I feel the latter.

But you see, this uptime, this little huge number (about 32,390,084 seconds) has been there, coexisting in time. It’s the longest any of my property has stayed on, as far as a I now. It’s the only computer I own that has stayed on for that long! I even have the uptime advertised on my curriculum vitae. Yes, my CV! here: https://cv.thetrevor.tech. Actually, the last time the uptime of my server was recorded was on Agusut the 16th at 10:43:02 CDT 2023. That was an uptime of a little more than 365 days, almost exactly a year! Very weird thing to discover. And when I reboot, will it all go to doom? I sure hope not, since I am not where my server is.

My server is far, far away. Slightly less than 100 miles from me. Should it not wake back up, what should I do? Well, I’ve done this before, I will not lie. I’ve talked to people near the server, to see if they can fix it. They have indeed fixed it. Thank you.

But I want it to spring back to life. On its own. It should connect to the network automatically, exposing its ports (80 and 443) to the world, not giving a worry about anything, and really Just Workin'!

I hope you really do work. This will be the last upload with a very big uptime of 374 days and a little more time.

Alright, see you on the other side!