RE: OT: Routers with highest uptime

Even 23 years ago, not quite the flex.

Remember, SQL Slammer that took out / degraded large chunks of the internet?

That vulnerability had been fixed in a patch released 6 months prior to that incident. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Beecher via NANOG <[email protected]> 
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2026 2:41 PM
To: North American Network Operators Group <[email protected]>
Cc: Tom Beecher <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: OT: Routers with highest uptime

Yeah, not the flex it used to be.

If you publish a device's uptime, it's not hard to infer what OS might be on it, and know exactly how you can exploit that.

Also agreed with Patrick, if you have any routers in a lab, those are the ones that I'd expect to be updated MORE frequently, not less.

On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 2:37 PM Andrew Kirch via NANOG < [email protected]> wrote:

> I... umm... have you consider applying security patches on these any 
> time in the last 10+ years (I'm really not taking the time to do the math here)?
>
> Best practices are simply not to leave a system up unpatched that long 
> anymore.  This is why Netcraft took that metric down.  It encouraged a 
> perverse incentive.
>
> Andrew
>
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 2:30 PM Markus via NANOG 
> <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi NANOG,
> >
> > in the past there was the Netcraft website which showed publicly 
> > "Servers with the highest uptime". Sadly that site apparently 
> > doesn't exist anymore.
> >
> > I'm wondering what are the routers worldwide with the highest 
> > uptime. :)
> >
> > I'll make a start. 2x Juniper M7i lab routers running BGP + VRRP:
> >
> > --- JUNOS 12.3R2.5 built 2013-03-22 16:52:47 UTC admin@test01> show 
> > system uptime Current time: 2026-02-25 20:04:26 CET System booted: 
> > 2015-05-16 03:44:05 CEST (562w4d 17:20 ago) Protocols started: 
> > 2015-05-16 03:46:59 CEST (562w4d 17:17 ago) Last configured: 
> > 2026-02-22 18:57:12 CET (3d 01:07 ago) by admin
> >   8:04PM  up 3938 days, 17:20, 1 user, load averages: 0.25, 0.22, 
> > 0.17
> >
> > --- JUNOS 12.3R2.5 built 2013-03-22 16:52:47 UTC admin@test02> show 
> > system uptime Current time: 2026-02-25 20:04:59 CET System booted: 
> > 2015-01-31 03:43:58 CET (577w4d 16:21 ago) Protocols started: 
> > 2015-01-31 03:47:48 CET (577w4d 16:17 ago) Last configured: 
> > 2026-02-19 20:41:16 CET (5d 23:23 ago) by admin
> >   8:04PM  up 4043 days, 16:21, 1 user, load averages: 0.19, 0.08, 
> > 0.07
> >
> > Is that good or "like nothing"? :)
> >
> > Regards
> > Markus
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