Alexander Bochmann has recently posted a message to misc@ to tell us about his OpenBSD 2.3 machine which has recently been put to rest after it became unresponsive, and no efforts to resurrect it had succeeded. If you have a machine of this era, or older that's still running, please submit a story about it. Especially if it's still in production somewhere.

The machine was a Pentium-133, 32MB RAM. 4GB Quantum IDE HDD, 3Com 509(?) ISA.I think some 512k Trident VGA graphics card. As far as I remember, most of the stuff had been 2nd hand even in '98. A couple of years ago, the mainboard had been replaced by something with a K6-233 CPU as the old one had died. The harddisk survived to the end (although that may have been the component that finally failed - didn't have a chance to get access to the hardware yet).

The system's name was "base", originally installed with OpenBSD 2.3 on Jun 12, 1998:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 5 Jun 12 1998 etc/myname

It ran the OpenBSD 2.3 kernel and most of the userland until it stopped responding about three weeks ago and couldn't be resurrected.

Small hardware problems had happened before, as with most systems that have been running uninterrupted for nearly 10 years, but this time I decided against getting it up again: Running modern software had gotten a real chore (never managed to backport OpenSSH, for example, so it still had the last version of the old ssh.com daemon (1.2.32?). (Well, that, and the 2.3 GENERIC kernel reliably shot down the VMWare session I tried to get it running in.)

Good old internet software like sendmail or bind never were a problem though, even in their most recent versions (which may or may not be a compliment, depending on your point of view).

To my knowlege, the system never was hacked - despite running software like qpop 2.53 or really, really old versions of apache and php. (I sometimes found core files, but I guess the system was just too obscure to be a valid target for any type of automated attack.)

base had lots of old stuff still lying around, like an emergency netboot environment for the sun3/160 that it had replaced as main server for infra.de back at the time, an Amanda client for my old employer's network backup system that's long gone, or the configuration for half a dozen UUCP feeds which have lost their peers ages ago.

Gone are the days when 32MB RAM was a lot, a stripped down OpenBSD kernel had a whopping 1MB, and a handful of blacklists got rid of almost all of the spam.

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1056157 Jul 31 2002 /bsd

What is your oldest running system? Do you have 4 digit uptime?

Let's all have a moment of silence for what may have been the oldest living relative to the latest release of OpenBSD. Preorder your CDs now!