I setup a small Windows NT 4.0 PDC/Exchange 5.5 server in late 1998. 6 years later my wife is now working for this company and I run into their network admin one day when I went to see her. We're rehashing the old days and I mention that server from so long ago. The guy laughs and tells me it's still their PDC! I'm stunned. He takes me to the much improved server room and there's the old Compaq Proliant tower looking out of place next to a shiny new server rack filled with buzzing modern monster boxes. He says they are trying to convert to Active Directory but various issues keep cropping up. Asks me to take a look at a strange one. Occasionally a user is not able to reset their password when it expires and he has to do it for them. I start poking around the server, event log, etc and just happen to notice something strange. The C:\ volume is at 0 bytes. Not 1 byte. 0 Bytes free. completely out of space. I'm totally confused. How is this server running? It was. The admin reports no other problem beyond the occasional password reset and says he hasn't rebooted that server in months. All I can says is they were blessed. We cleared up some space (deleted 42000 temp files probably helped) and that fixed the password problem. They kept that server for another 4 years.

The powered off box earned its retirement and the admin kept it in a quiet corner of the server room where it can regale the other, younger servers with tales of uptime they can only dream about.

Sadly the admin moved on to bigger things a while back and the server was unceremoniously relegated to the scrap heap by some busy young intern and quietly forgotten despite its years of loyal service.