Why LispOS?

[Neil T. Mathison]

On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, Damond Walker wrote:

> 	                          ...a year or two without rebooting.
> Where have you had that happen?  The only system that runs a year or two
> without *some* kind of reboot is a system that isn't used.

Here are some real stats from for some of the systems
we have in my company. (Note: The desktop platforms are rebooted often by
the users as a general approach to fixing a problem. With proper
administration of these platforms, more uptime could be squeezed out
of them I'm sure.) 

  system              OS                  uptime           last reboot for
--------------  ----------------------  ---------          ---------------
DEC3000/300      Digital Unix 4.0B       341 days        OS upgrade
  - Functions as intranet server (apache), mail (pop and imap), primary    
    DNS, primary ftp site, dhcp and samba

SGI ChallengeS   Irix 6.2                262 days        kernel rebuild
  - Functions as internet web server (apache), listproc, sql DBMS for web,
    secondary DNS, some employee user accounts

Digital 486/66   FreeBSD 2.2.1           127 days        hardware upgrade 
  - Functions as router/gateway to internal private subnet. Does ip
filtering, network address translation.

SGI Indy         Irix 6.2                 26 days        swap out bad drive
  - Development system (photoshop, web development tools)

DEC Alpha 2000   Win NT 3.51              46 days        blue screened
  - File services, print spooling, finance dbms

Digital VAX      Open VMS 6.1            201 days        network rewiring
  - runs some legacy applications

Macintoshes      MacOS 7.6/8.1           often           performed by user
WinTel           Win 95                  often           performed by user


Of course the servers do need a steady dose of massaging - eyeing the
logs daily, tweeking processes, monitoring swap space, etc. 


Unix ain't that bad.

Regards,

Neil Mathison
Unix Systems Administrator
Corporation for Public Broadcasting