2009 uptime for the Color Classic web server

2009 started off a bit rocky for uptime, as a combination of a flaky router and spring thunderstorms in central Texas combined to take the server offline when it lost its internet connection or electrical power. Replacing the router and adding a UPS improved uptime significantly as you can see from the bar graph below.

The final tally for 2009 as recorded by websitepulse.com (who kindly monitors this site for free!) is an uptime of just under 98%. While that's a remarkable statistic for a computer that's 16 years old operating on residential broadband internet connection, there's still room for for improvement. Here's hoping 2010 will bring uptime over the 99% average!

Color Classic Web Server - HTTP
Month	Total Checks	Fails	Avg resp.time	Uptime %
1 Jan - 31 Dec 2009	9054	196	3,563.72	97.84 %
Report generated on: 13 Jan 2010 Website Monitoring Data provided by WebSitePulse

Color Classic gets a new home

The Color Classic was offline briefly for a cleaning and a short move into another room at our residence. Instead of being located in our master bedroom (where the cable modem had been installed) it's now down the hallway in the office. I don't know how well I will be able to sleep without the gentle hum of the SCSI hard drive constantly in the background.

Before the move I took the opportunity to open it up, slide out the logic board, and carefully blow off two years worth of dust that had settled on the surface. I also vacuumed the interior, side vents, floppy drive opening, and fan slots on the back which all had quite an accumulation of dust, lint, and cat fur. Hopefully it will run a little cooler now.

Would you pay $5K for a Color Classic?

 In June, 2006 Maple Ridge Auctions sold a rare Macintosh Color Classic prototype with a translucent case on eBay. The winning bidder paid $4,999. Check out the beautiful pictures in this flickr set (photos are used by permission of Maple Ridge Auctions).

Back on track with uptime

Swapping out the router seems to have done the trick to get the Color Classic reliably back online. The downtime hasn't been the fault of the CC; the prior Netgear router would randomly "forget" it's port forwarding settings and instead of sending http requests to the web server on the Color Classic it would handle them with it's own internal web server that's used to configure the router settings.

Since I replaced it with the Linksys the server has been online nonstop for a week without issues, so hopefully we'll see another 100% month in the near future!

Router swapped to resolve network issue

The Netgear WGR614 that my local cable company gave me to enable wireless access with my internet service has an annoying habit of forgetting my directions to route incoming traffic on port 80 to the Color Classic Web Server. Instead, it sends incoming http connections to the admin page of the router, which is secured with a password, but isn't the destination that people are looking for.

As a result, uptime statistics for the CCWS for the month of January were almost below 90%. This evening I swapped out the Netgear with the Linksys WRT54G router I have used for a couple of years without this issue and hopefully uptime will become reliable again.

New York Times misidentifies Color Classic

The New York Times recently published a special multimedia article authored by Sam Grobart entitled While You Were Out: Apple’s Years With and Without Steve Jobs.

A timeline from 1976 through 2007 is accompanied with a slideshow illustrating Apple's products, links to NYT stories from the past about their introduction, and spoken narration by Mr. Grobart.

Aficionados of the Macintosh Color Classic will bristle, however, at the 1993 slide which identifies a Macintosh LC520 as a Color Classic. The caption also describes an LC III as a "Macintosh IIIc" (click photo above for full sized image and caption).

No 100% uptime in January ...

Started off the New Year out of town and the Color Classic web server decided to stop responding. Our neighbor who was kindly taking care of our cats, fish, and turtles in our absence restarted it for me, but it looks like my hopes for 100% uptime this month are already dashed.