Conspiracy of the Undead

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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