Uptime
Unix nerds love uptime. So let me tell you the story of how I lost my Linux box’s uptime, just a few days short of a year. (If you’re not a nerd, you probably won’t appreciate this.)
I woke up this morning, hung over a little bit. Something was beeping. I looked at my alarm clock, but it was off. So in my head, I thought, “Oh, now that I realize it’s off, it should stop beeping now.”
Still more beeping. I woke up enough to unplug the alarm clock that was already off! This made sense to me.
Still more beeping. By this time, the brain cells had decided to roll out of bed and have a little meet-up to see if they could find a way to make the beeping stop and go back to bed. I put together that the power was out. The beeping I realized was coming from my UPS! Instead of addressing the situation, the brain cells staggered back to bed. A few beeps later, one brain cell decided to blow the whistle, and I realized what was going on. The power was gone, and the UPS was almost drained, so it was beeping for help! I jumped out of bed, and ran to my laptop, which was still running on it’s own battery. There was no way I could avoid my Linux machine shutting down, but I had to document the uptime! I had to get a screenshot as proof, at least! No sooner had I typed ssh sanchez, my fingers poised to type uptime as fast as possible, than I heard trusty sanchez power down.
Extrapolating from this post, sanchez was up for 346 days. And I didn’t even get a screenshot!