Flashes of Panic

I just looked at the uptime for my solid-as-a-rock webserver and saw a single-digit number of days.

Oh, $#!+, did it crash and I missed it?

Nope. I had a little tickle in my head that maybe uptime, like an odometer, rolls over. It turns out that after 497 days or so, the counter overflows the available memory space, so it resets to zero and starts over. No reboot, no crash.

It reminds me of the rusty Mercury I drove in high school (and most of college.) I remember pulling over to the side of a road in, I think, Bowdoinham, and watching the odometer roll from 99999 to 00000. (Only five digits, the pessimists. I’d have to drive a million miles in my Civic to get all zeroes again.) When we sold it, we had to check the box on the title stating that the mileage exceeded the mechanical limits of the odometer.

And that’s only real similarity between Raven, which should have several more years of productive life in it, and that car, which was already superannuated when I started driving it.

Now Playing: Easter Theatre from Apple Venus Volume 1 by XTC