645 days

Well, it was a sad moment, but it had to happen. While I was in Des Moines for that meeting, I walked over to our office there and (with permission) shutdown Parallel to bring it home.

Picking up the server was a surreal experience. First of all, it was an all-indoor five-block walk from the conference center to our Des Moines offices. You can do that in some places in Chicago for a block or two, but I think Des Moines has a lot more passageways and hamster tubes than Chicago. I and four coworkers walked into the reception area in an office where nobody knew me by sight. Someone from that office had called ahead to let them know I was coming, but all they had was my name.

The receptionist he talked to was on break, but her substitute called her and confirmed it was OK. A third person walked me back to the server room and let me in, where I walked right up to a server, logged in, shut it down, unplugged it, and walked out the front door carrying it. If I had done all that without someone calling ahead, it really would have been a scary thing.

The final uptime was 645 days and about 9 hours running continuously without a reboot. The server is now resting comfortably at my house. I only need a few small tidbits off it before it can be repurposed or retired.

In some ways, it's sad to see old hardware that has been working well come to the end of its cycle. In this case, Parallel served two full cycles - once as someone's desktop computer, once as a webserver. Fear not, because Parallel may yet ride again! Since it's been so dependable so far, I may give it a third life as a firewall/router/web filter for Jen & Eric.