The Sysadmin's Daily Grind: Uptimed

Conspiracy of the Undead

© Serj Siz`kov, Fotolia

© Serj Siz`kov, Fotolia

Article from Issue 101/2009
Author(s):

Who has the longest uptime? Linux systems used to win hands down when it comes to maximum uptime without rebooting. Today, uptime statistics help admins with monitoring tasks and discovering tricky bugs.

The times when I showed off servers with 1,000 days of uptime to make my colleagues from the Windows team jealous are long gone. If I get caught with a Methuselah like this today, I can expect to answer embarrassing questions about whether I am afraid of kernel updates. (The answer to this is: Yes! I use some fairly exotic RAID controllers now because I shot myself in the foot when I updated to 2.6.27 – ouch!)

Security freaks tell scary stories about the exploits they guess will work on systems that nobody has bothered booting for a year or so. Bragging can't be the only reason why so many admins use Uptimed [1], a daemon that logs a system's uptime over an extended period of time. It makes sense for devices that are not otherwise accessible for monitoring, for reasons of location or security – you get to know exactly when the power supply last failed, or a hardware component died on you.

You can use the /etc/uptimed.conf configuration file to control Uptimed's behavior. The entry

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