It can stay up as long as you want. However, it is a good idea to run updates once a week or once a month unless you have it set to automatically install security updates.
The only time I reboot my server is to boot into a new kernel, or another update that is flagged as "restart required." Here's the current uptime of my 12.04 box (which was installed when 12.04 was released):
Code:
# Uptime | System Boot up
----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
1 20 days, 07:08:27 | Linux 3.2.0-29-generic Fri Aug 10 07:20:09 2012
2 18 days, 22:27:01 | Linux 3.2.0-26-generic Wed Jul 4 09:57:42 2012
3 18 days, 21:22:01 | Linux 3.2.0-24-generic Sat May 26 15:19:01 2012
4 18 days, 20:13:03 | Linux 3.2.0-24-generic Thu May 3 10:48:22 2012
5 15 days, 23:55:08 | Linux 3.2.0-27-generic Wed Jul 25 06:49:11 2012
6 15 days, 09:01:05 | Linux 3.2.0-30-generic Wed Sep 5 22:00:38 2012
7 15 days, 00:13:54 | Linux 3.2.0-25-generic Thu Jun 14 12:41:52 2012
-> 8 9 days, 23:09:20 | Linux 3.2.0-30-generic Fri Sep 21 07:02:34 2012
9 6 days, 07:08:01 | Linux 3.2.0-29-generic Thu Aug 30 14:29:27 2012
10 4 days, 21:00:16 | Linux 3.2.0-26-generic Fri Jun 29 12:56:35 2012
----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
1up in 5 days, 01:04:35 | at Sat Oct 6 07:16:27 2012
no1 in 10 days, 07:59:08 | at Thu Oct 11 14:11:00 2012
up 155 days, 10:15:54 | since Sat Apr 28 19:41:15 2012
down 0 days, 00:14:45 | since Sat Apr 28 19:41:15 2012
%up 99.993 | since Sat Apr 28 19:41:15 2012
Do you plan are having this server accessible from the internet? If so, I would recommend against running ftp on it, and use sftp (via ssh) instead.
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