We had a comp at work back in 2011 that had 10 yrs uptime, serving a couple of file shares.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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My record is 9.9 years (and going). This is my old Thinkpad T420 which lives on my equipment rack to act as a SSH / web console for my equipment. I just close the lid and put it to sleep when it's' not in use. It doesn't even connect to the internet, just my isolated management VLAN.
My HomeAssistant server (also an old ThinkPad) is the next longest at just under a year. It also lives on an isolated VLAN.
Both of these are repurposed laptops with batteries in good condition and thus have built-in UPS (in addition to the UPS they're plugged into).
The rest average about 4-7 months depending on power outages (rare but when they do occur, they're longer than my UPS can provide) and rebooting for kernel updates.
Holy crap. This is what I was thinking of when I asked Lemmy hahaha
I know it is totally unnecessary but is it possible to change battery without rebooting?
On these, yes, but the batteries are not integrated like in modern laptops.
I regularly reboot everything to install security updates and such. I know you can hotpatch but I don't trust it.
For me it's not about trusting the hotpatching; I know it can work. What I don't trust is my own ability to not only do it properly but also to do it in less time than it takes to carefully close all my programs, reboot and then get them all started again. And so, reboot.
And to save making another comment elsewhere: About a week. It would have been longer, but I was having a configuration issue and a reboot seemed like a good idea at the time.
Compute:
Best uptime: 5 or 6 months of my NAS
Infrastructure:
Switch: 247 days, 22 hours, 58 minutes 44 seconds
Boot up in the morning, shut down before bed. Small home server that uses about $1.50/month in electricity that i leave on 24/7 running jellyfin and mealie
Oh thank dog, it took way too much scrolling to find someone here that shuts down their workstation overnight. Unless I actually have something long-running that I want to come back to in the morning (which is rare) it just makes no sense to me to leave it on while I'm asleep.
Oh, but my piHole has been running for a very long time
My oldest computer runs a private Better Minecraft server on Debian. Hasn't been restarted in over 4 months.
My NAS idk, running since last power outage sometime in August I think.
Living Room PC and my desktop are both CachyOS btw and you know the drill for rolling releases.
server uptime, no more than 30 days.
patching should happen monthly.
workstation. again, patching.
I got into the habit at work and started doing it at home. 🤷 that's about it.
Not a lot of uptime because I do reboot to apply the latest kernel versions.
I just migrated my Proxmox server to newish hardware, so its uptime now is only about two weeks.
In general the only time I restart it is when a new kernel comes down. So that could be uptime from a month to several months. I never restart it just because, it's only when an update requires it.
Proxmox sits on an HP workstation with a Xeon processor and ECC memory, so it's pretty reliable. Although it does not have redundant power supplies or the like.
All of my laptops and towers and Unifi router/ WAPs get restarted for updates and that's it.
The longest uptime I personally have ever seen in my career as an IT professional was in a customer's data center when my company took over their IT services. This was many many years ago. They had a Novell Netware server that had an uptime of over 10 years... In a PRODUCTION environment. The company's representative stated that they were afraid of rebooting it because they didn't think it would come back up. That became one of my company's projects to replace it, which we did. I wasn't a part of that specific activity, but a friend of mine was as he was Novell certified. Once everything was migrated, he attempted to reboot the machine just to see if it would...
The damn thing restarted like a champ. It came back up normally with no issues. Novell Netware could probably run on a rock as long as it had enough silica content.
My server's uptime is roughly the time between two kernel updates. On my desktop PC it's mostly 4-10 hours depending on what I do during the day.
I demand 100% up time from all my devices. I built my PC in 2017 and it's been fully powered down 46 times since then and most of those were due to the municipal power grid failing.
No UPS?
Do you track your outages to get your metric of 46 or is it just a random number?
I have a tally on my case.
I love this idea haha
I havent had an electrical outage in >7 years (and probably longer) knocks on wood.
workstation: 8 hours, 23 minutes home(i actually have it at my work)server: 5 weeks, 4 days, 9 hours, 53 minutes
PC stays on until I find a reason to reboot it. most of what I do is in vms so I'm not that concerned about security patches. it's at 30 days right now without issues.
similar for the server. everything is in docker containers that I restart once or twice a month. it's around 70 days right now as I had to rebuild a lot of it due to some catastrophic failures.
I reboot quarterly for hypervisors and monthly for LAN. Anything outward facing reboots weekly.
My layer 3 switch recently hit 400 days though. That's my highest uptime in my network.
Workstation: 24 days. Daily driver. Laptop Linux mint
GPU desktop: 0 days. Custom gaming desktop hooked up to my tv in the living room. Powered on only during use.
Home Server: 0 days. SFF HP in a moving box. Planned to build and setup services. Got my laptop running a few things on as needed.
according to Termux my phone has been up for 5 days.
my computer, minecraft server and laptop are all currently turned off.
My raspberry pi was running for 3 years until my mother in law was having trouble connecting to the home VPN last month. She lives abroad but wants to watch BBC iPlayer stuff. Turned out an update had nuked her user settings, so I rebooted it for nothing.
Servers get rebooted and patched every 30-60 days or so, both Windows and Linux, but Windows more often.
Synology NAS has been up probably close to 2 years now.
UniFi network maybe 1.5 years.
Up since the last time when I experimented with the boot config - somewhere around 1/2025.
PC: off
Laptop: Asleep (and too lazy to fetch to check. But a few days ig)
Server, both routers and the IPv4 providing VPS: 10.5 days
Backup/GPU server: 25 days
Need to update and reboot them all tho, because there's a new kernel for testing.