At work, there are three servers that NEVER get rebooted. They chug along happily doing what they are supposed to do. One of them is a webserver, the other is a database server, and the third is a development server. All three machines were brought up at roughly the same time and the uptimes of the first two show that:
db1:~# uptime 08:35:07 up 490 days, 15 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00 db1:~#
web1:~# uptime 08:36:47 up 490 days, 31 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 web1:~#
The third machine, however, looks very odd:
dev1:~# uptime 08:32:31 up 12:12, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.06, 0.03 dev1:~#
All the machines are running the same basic software set (with the dev1 server receiving more updates than any of the others. As best as I can tell, the machine was not rebooted, powered down, or altered in anyway. Uptime just seems to think so. They are running Linux 2.4.18 from Debian.
Can anyone explain this?