65,000 hours of DC

[AMDave]

One day, about seven and a half years ago, I came home chuffed to bits.

I wrestled the box out of the back seat of the car and got to unpacking it right away.

I remember I spent a whole evening plugging things in and loading up software and going 'look at that!' and marvelling at how quick the AMD Duron was at floating point calculations.

And so was born my first dedicated boxen, "dn01".

Over the years I have thrown some tremendous challenges at that little machine and it never failed to bring me joy by grinding through the hard stuff.
It has been a desktop, a database server, a web server and all of the time a dedicated cruncher.

I have paid it plenty of attention with 6 monthly tear-downs, cleaning and rebuilds and once in a while a new CMOS battery.

It just kept on performing.

Looking at the date on the invoice and estimating the number and length of the outages, it seems that this little boxen has poured its heart out for me for about 65,000 hours.

About a month ago it started to show some signs of trouble with an intermittent reboot that I could not pin down.

This week, the spontaneous reboots have grown closer and closer together.

Tonight they are just minutes apart.

The parts required to bench test the fault are no longer available.

It is time to retire good old 'dn01'.

65,000 hours of DC - Thanks AMD, for completely exceeding my expectations.