Tracking Server Uptimes

Unlike some other OS's, Linux almost never has to reboot… or so I was told when I first started learning about it. To illustrate the point, my mentor introduced me to an app that he ran on all of his servers called uptimed. It is similar to the utility that most of us have heard of, uptime, except that it runs as a daemon and logs the system's uptime instead of just reading info that is lost on a reboot. Uptimed provides a secondary command called uprecords that give statistics and makes it easy to see how long your server has been up, what the longest it has ever been up is, when it rebooted, and more.

uprecords screenshot

Until recently, I just took for granted that this wonderful app was still being maintained since it has always been available to me… enter CentOS 6. Even with the usual suspects added to my list of available repositories it was nowhere to be found. My roots are in Gentoo so I decided to take a look at its ebuild (uptimed-0.3.16-r4.ebuild) and see where they pulled it from. Based on that I was able to find the source and, sadly, find that it is not being maintained anymore. The logical solution: grab the source and build my own RPM that could be distributed where I work… that too was a no-go due to dependency on an older version of automake.

The bottom line: if you run Gentoo or Ubuntu you can still grab uptimed via your package manager. As for the rest of us, hopefully someone will read this and either decide to pickup maintenance or be able to enlighten us to a good alternative.

UPDATES: 

  • Thanks to help from a commenter below I have been able to build and install uptimed on 64-bit CentOS 6.  I am working on setting things up so I can publish my changes.
  • Source that is patched for CentOS 6 is now available on GitHub. Check out  uptimed.technicalissues.us for more info.
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