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   nixCraft 🐧 (nixcraft@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Nov-2024 20:08:02 JST nixCraft 🐧

   In a big, empty room filled with computers, there's an old Sun Solaris server sitting under a desk no one remembers. It has an uptime of over 20 years. Every day, a cron job runs on a forgotten Solaris box, generating critical financial data everyone uses to make retirement investments. Even though no one thinks about this box, everyone needs it & fetches that data using FTP. It works all alone, making sure people can retire comfortably. It's like a secret helper, quietly working in the cold.

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 09-Nov-2024 20:08:00 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • oceaniceternity

     @oceaniceternity @nixCraft Civilizations will rise and fall, glacial ice sheets and tropical rain forests will advance and retreat, continents will drift as the stars shift into strange new constellations, and somewhere an obscure priesthood will gather every midsummer eve to sacrifice a black goat over the SCSI cable that promises every pious man an RV to drive around the legendary lost kingdom of Flori-duh after retirement.

     Still Solaris marches tirelessly on, unto the 64 bit time_t epoch.

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     oceaniceternity (oceaniceternity@sakurajima.moe)'s status on Saturday, 09-Nov-2024 20:08:02 JST oceaniceternity

     in reply to

     @nixCraft The only person who knows about it is a wizened janitor given a sacred task by the system engineer who set it up. Somehow, every year he oils the machine in specific places and venerates it with the proper chants and incense to appease the machine spirit and feed it sacred smoke.