Why would this start a flame war?  We all know that a certain OS from
the northern West Coast is unreliable....  Novell, Linux, FreeBSD,
AS/400, System/390, and the like are all reliable, just not that certain
other OS.  :-)

(There's another desktop OS from CA, which runs on the Power PC chip,
and is probably even less reliable, that is, until, possibly, late
March, but it isn't proven, yet.....)

I am still amazed at all the "eyes as big as saucers" responses I get,
when I tell them about Linux's reliability.  I guess the "bar" has been
lowered so far, that uptimes of a month or more actually elicit a
response.  They shouldn't, though, if you think about it....

Linux may actually be less reliable than Novell (yes/no/maybe), FreeBSD
(maybe/probably), AS/400 (definitely), and System/390 (absolutely), but
it's more than reliable enough to run a "mission critical" app on a
server, where that app is not an airline reservation system, flight
RADAR, medical equipment, large-scale ERP system, etc....  The other
two, above, including their latest incarnations, aren't even close.

Obviously, power, the sysadmin (!), hardware, software,
hardware/software upgrades, hackers/crackers, system load, bugs,
peripherals, and even the network, all change the equation
dramatically.  For instance, I've seen Novell die almost daily on one
box and just run forever, on its neighbor; I've seen the same for AIX,
Solaris, Linux, SCO, and those less reliable OSes, above.

I saw that TechWeb article.  Awhile back, I heard of almost the same
thing happening to an AS/400, also for two years of accidentally being
"walled in."  And I've also heard of the occasional 5-year uptime of a
heavily utilized Linux box....  But I've never heard of a five year
uptime of a heavily loaded (name omitted) box, which only averages
somewhere around one or two nines of uptime.

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