We found an amusing and heartwarming story where someone claimed his server was like the Energizer Bunny. And kept going. And going. For years. So we thought it would be fun to see actual proof of such longevity. We invited our readers to send us a screen shot showing how long their NetWare server had been chugging along. Whoever had the NetWare server with the most staying power would become the proud owner of a Palm Pilot VIIx Handheld.

After all, there are numerous perhaps apochryphal stories of functioning servers being trapped inside walls and such, but one takes such things with a grain of salt unless one can see proof. Not that you guys would ever lie, but we've read a lot of creative resumés in our time...

Well, now that the contest is over, we must say, we're very impressed by the number of faithful NetWare servers that are quietly humming to themselves in darkened rooms across the globe, requiring little more than an air-conditioner and an uninterrupted power supply (no small thing in these troubled times) to keep dishing out files. Seems as if Y2K was the main reason a lot of people downed their servers, so we're betting that if we'd done this before December 1999, there would have been even more impressive numbers turned in.

As it was, some of you took a chance and left your servers alone during the Y2K madness, and happily discovered that things kept on ticking after all. Some of you have even discovered that if you don't need the patches for other reasons, an unpatched NetWare server can be a pretty tenacious piece of work.

Winners

The grand prize, a Palm Pilot, has been awarded to Bart Burkhardt, who has not had to worry about his box for over 2331 days.

Second prize, an ergonomic calculator, goes to Steven Jones, whose entry showed a whopping 1668 days without a hitch:

Third prize, an equally ergonomic calculator, goes to Olaf Necker, who clocked 1539 days:

Comments from Contestants

All of you who entered the contest, thank you very much for playing. We had a lot of fun reading your entries. Here are some of our favorite excerpts from the e-mails attached to these entries:

• Please see attached screenshot. We usually never have longer running NetWare Servers, because we keep them up-to-date - or else we would never earn any money!

• I have attached a screenshot of one of our servers, up since our last power outage.

• This server's running time would be at about 440 days if a contractor had
  not killed the power to it.

• Here is one of our servers, it was only turned off due to an upgrade!!!!

• Since this time, our server didn't crash. With best regards and long life to Novell.

• This is one of several servers that have been up this amount of time.
  This is a GroupWise server. It would have been up longer except that
  we had a tornado come through our area and knocked the power out.

• If it wasn't for rebooting after service packs they would never go down...

• Here is my entry for the server uptime contest. Unfortunately it is due to get SP9 in a few weeks so there goes the uptime on this server.

• My NetWare Server has an uptime of more than 243 days at 04-27-2001 9:50.
  Because its name is TITAN.....

• Had I known you were going to run this contest I would have held off
  re-booting all of our servers....

• This server may be old and not even Y2K compliant, but it still
  works!

• Actually, last time I had to reboot this server because of a need to replace the external tape drive. If not that, we would have about three years of the
  server running without a glitch.

• Attached is a screen shot from one of our servers within the
  district. This is the only one we have not bounced this year. Normally we
  try to re-start the servers every 60 days, but this building does not have
  a tech person on staff....the only reason I could enter the contest!

• I dumped the screenshot into Wordpad so don't hold the file extension against me. I really didn't put it in an MS Word doc for submission...

• Probably not in the same league as other entries you'll get, but worth a
  try. History doesn't record why the Server was taken down prior to this, probably to move it into a rack, not for any other reason.

• I have enclosed for you a screen shot of a client's Novell 3.12 server. It would probably have gone for much longer if not for the client's (incredibly stupid) decision to migrate to an "alternative" Network Operating System!

• I could've had a much longer uptime if it wasn't for that reboot after
  installing that support pack 240 days ago. That was the only reboot since installing NetWare 5 that I can remember.

• It has not been up for years but NW servers are still far ahead of the NT ones here.

• Servers on Viagra - up for a long time. This server acts as a mirror copy (overnight arcserve job) for other servers (it's effectively a standby server). Unfortunately, the powers that be have decided to go for Windows 2000 clusters in an NT4 domain. Already each cluster has crashed at least once, and they've only been in for a couple of months.

• I know it's too late and I don't have a screen print, but on 5/9/2001 I
  took our Novell 3.20 server down to install an ethernet card (yup, I'm still running TOKEN RING!!!) and it had been up for 304 days prior to that. It's a 100 user network running on a Compaq Prosignia 500 (Pentium 120) with 206? mbs memory. I love my Novell but I also don't get a lot of troubleshooting experience.

• This server just keeps on going! I hardly ever need to work on it, and since it's been in an air conditioned room it's never abended!
  
  
  
  Good old NetWare 3.11... if only modern O/Ss were made of the same stuff.
  Forget Windows 2000 for 99.999% uptime, this one had it ten years ago.