hi

[Ken Brown]

Declan McCullagh wrote:
> 
> My uptime on my Linux server is 112 days, and that's just because I
> had to install memory. My uptime on my Windows 98 laptop is about 1
> day.
> 
> My previous Windows laptop was even worse. My previous Unix box
> was the same.

Roughly my experience. My Windows 98 can stay up for a week if I don't
use it but I tend to do a reboot at least daily under real use (email &
word-processing mainly - my daughter plays  games & that's worse)
Windows 3.1 used to be far less reliable &  my iBook is pretty bad as
well.  I doubt if I've ever had 8 hours uninterrupted service from it.

Linux is about the same as Solaris - I've seen it up for a year, though
not on a machine that was doing much, and I'd be upset if one had to be
restarted as often as once a month for bugfixes or maintenance.  I have
seen some unpleasant memory problems on Solaris though not on Linux, but
I've used Linux less (just one box at work & another at home at the
moment - but at a previous place of employment we managed to keep
Linux-based firewalls and web caches going for 24/7 3 weeks out of 4)  

I guess Linux is maybe 100 times as reliable as Windows 98?

I've had over a year's continuous online operation, with heavy use, 
from some of the more robust Unices, especially AIX & DGUX (I've known
AIX systems continue to run quite happily after the system disk was
totally trashed with an rm -fR *, also I've seen them carry on for
months with real hardware errors on disks, screens and even memory)

To be fair to Microsoft I have seen dedicated servers based on DOS that
just ran one program all the time stay up for a very long time indeed.
But as soon as Windows gets into the picture, reliability goes through
the floor. NT can stand for weeks provided you don't use it as an IIS
web server or Exchange server, that tends to kill it, as does MS Word of
all things.  I've been using NT since beta releases of 3.1 & I am very
familiar with the way it hangs. I've also installed literally dozens, if
not hundreds, of NT systems. It really is far, far, more reliable than
W98 and far, far, less than a decent Unix (don't ask me about SCO
though)


Ken (who lost count of how many different OS he's installed & worked on
at about 19. Systems that is, not years.)