OpenBSD Journal

RIP: Oldest OpenBSD machine left on the net is put to rest

Contributed by paul on from the the-deep-dark-archives dept.

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.

Alexander Bochmann writes:

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 A couple of years ago, the mainboard had been replaced by something with a K6-233 CPU as the old one had died.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).

Alexander continues:

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!

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Renaud Allard (renaud) renaud@llorien.org on

    Nice to see OpenBSD is reliable for years, even with obsolete versions.

    I have nothing as old as this one, but still, I have an old Fujitsu Siemens running 3.4 which has never been rebooted since. It runs a DNS service.

    # uptime
    9:40AM up 1595 days, 21:52, 1 user, load averages: 0.09, 0.10, 0.08

    I would not like to power it down, as I am not sure the old IDE disk will accept to spin up again after having been forced to stop.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (64.92.206.84) on

      Congrulations on your unpatched, vulnerable system.

      Comments
      1. By Rich (195.212.199.56) on

        > Congrulations on your unpatched, vulnerable system.

        Is that a comment from someone who doesn't actually USE the systems he maintains? I have a 3.6 system running quite nicely. It started as 3.5, but after updating it to 3.6, I'm afraid the pain involved has prevented me from updating it further.

        Updating a system to keep it up to date with the latest and greatest is a great ideal, but in the real world, it's just not practical a lot of the time. For me, issues to consider are:

        1/ Can I afford the downtime?
        2/ Can I afford the risk of even more downtime if it goes wrong?
        3/ Do I have the time time required to do the job

        The machine mentioned above was very remote, so I had to drag myself bodily over to where it lived to do the update. And then despite lots of preparation, something went wrong. I couldn't afford the time to stay on-site fixing it, so I had to bring it back with me, and then a week later take it back to it's home.

        So to answer each of my three questions above, the answer is "no" in each case.

        I put a lot of effort into making sure the machine was very well locked-down and I have no reason to believe it has ever been hacked or is likely to be, so I'm not particularly concerned about it not being the latest version, so I'm happy to leave it at 3.6.

        That's life, I'm afraid. You pays your money and takes your choice.

      2. By Renaud Allard (renaud) on

        > Congrulations on your unpatched, vulnerable system.

        It does not run bind, if that's what you mean.

  2. By Martin Hein (91.143.113.62) on

    Until november 2007 I had a 2.9/i386 running at a customer site.

    Not quite as old.

    It was used as a mailrelay in front of his M$ servers. Additionally it ran bind as a hidden master using our servers as slaves.

    To get rid of IPFilter, I tried to get him to upgrade for years, but the box never failed so he allways replied, yes next monday :)

  3. By Anonymous Coward (151.136.100.2) on

    glamor...

  4. By Anonymous Coward (151.136.100.2) on

    remember kids -- the higher is your uptime the bigger your penis is!

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (219.90.242.112) on

      UPS == penis enlargement?

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (218.214.194.113) on

        > UPS == penis enlargement?

        Of course!

        Ups
        Penis
        Size

        !!

  5. By Surricani (151.59.199.172) surricani@ßurricani.net on

    OpenBSD 4.1-stable (conf) #0: Sat Feb 23 18:36:48 CET 2008
    root@desktop.localdomain:/tmp/conf
    cpu0: Intel Pentium (P54C) ("GenuineIntel" 586-class) 167 MHz
    cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8
    cpu0: F00F bug workaround installed
    real mem = 133787648 (130652K)
    avail mem = 114667520 (111980K)
    ...
    wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: <CF 1GB>
    wd0: 1-sector PIO, LBA, 967MB, 1981728 sectors
    ...
    vga1 at pci0 dev 9 function 0 "Trident TGUI 9660" rev 0xd3
    ...
    "Sun PCIO EBus2" rev 0x01 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 not configured
    hme0 at pci1 dev 0 function 1 "Sun HME" rev 0x01: irq 15, address...


    2:30PM up 206 days, 5:18, 0 users, load averages: 0.19, 0.13, 0.09

    Great firewall. Passive cooler. Low power.

  6. By Lennie (82.75.29.106) leen@wirehub.nl on

    I have a Pentium-75 running Linux as a firewall at a company of my family.

    It has new disks, it's also a backup-server, it needs a really old disk to start up because the bios doesn't understand the large disks. I have to tell the bios there are no disks there or it won't boot.

    It has 2 3COM 3c905C's (that's PCI) and 2 Intel EtherExpress 10/Pro (ISA)

    It was a Novell fileserver before that.

  7. By Chris (79.27.29.39) chris@chriswareham.net on http://www.chriswareham.net/

    I had a 486 running an old 2.x version (2.6 I think) until the hard drive crapped out a couple of years ago. I then installed a new disk but ended up giving the machine away before I'd got around to installing an OS on it. It had a whopping 8MB of RAM, which meant I had to install a stripped down kernel to stop the thing constantly hitting swap.

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