true, true..
though, i was thinking more of the 'put it in a closet and forget it's 
even there for years on end' kind of reliable versus 'you can keep this 
machine running for years on end with no downtime for maintenance'... 
though the scale of the system is a matter here, too.. large systems will 
have some parts fail, there are just so many more parts.. and in that 
situation the fix it without downtime is definitely the right way to go.. 

isildur

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002 vance@neurotica.com wrote:

> On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Lord Isildur wrote:
> 
> > yeah, those power supplies are amazing.. it never fails to impress me
> > when there's a quick power flicker.. all the PeeCees are rebooting, and
> > the DECstations are still running. i had a 5k240 up for 672 days, i shut
> > her down in august for reasons of temporary insanity.. i was going out of
> > the country for 2 weeks and wasnt as confident in the UPS, and decided to
> > down the machine. It was running just fine and still would be! well, the
> > downing of it also allowed me to upgrade it to a 5k260.. *sigh*
> > just about the only thing more indestructible than a DECstation might be
> > a microvax.. :-)
> 
> Naah.  There are always S/390's or Tandem Nonstops.  Pull a RAM board out
> of the system while it's running.
> 
> Peace...  Sridhar
> 
>