Are long uptimes still a thing? Both at home and in production at work I instead strive for regular updates and restarts.

Reminds me of the long-dead uptime-project.net

On their leaderboard there was an NT4.0 machine with several years of uptime. People accused the owner of having manipulated the reporting tool, but the owner said it was just being used as a secondary DNS server internally at a company, and scheduled to be replaced as soon as the hardware fails. I don't know whether that happened before the site shut down unfortunately.

A while ago at a company selling monitoring software I deployed an updated agent out to clients and immediately a large number of their Solaris (SPARC) servers went orange or red. Pretty quickly worried about what I'd done.

But, it turned out there was a bug in our earlier agent version that wrapped the uptime at 365 days and all their servers were well over that. They'd had warnings set at a year and critical at 18 months/2 years, some high value.

I asked if they were worried, and apologized for the bug. They said it wasn't a problem and just increase the thresholds so it was all green again and they'd get around to rebooting at some point.

Why would I send the uptime to a remote server?

This one is great: https://healthchecks.io/

As a fellow uptime monitoring vendor I couldn't figure out what this does - an explainer paragraph would do wonders

I still think of the freebsd server with just under 13 years of uptime when I killed it. No one can explain the rush of happiness that comes with issuing a shutdown command.

I tried powering it back online afterwards. It did not power back on.

Funny. Server Uptime but the host isn’t reachable

Ah - it's a project that's only for computers that use apt, and probably only amd64. How uninteresting.

i wonder if ‘finger’ and ‘.plan’ files can be used for uptime monitoring in similar fashion

you should probably open source this one.