## 1. Introduction

Uptimed is an uptime record daemon keeping track of the highest uptimes a
computer system ever had. It uses the system boot time to keep sessions
apart from each other. Uptimed comes with a console front-end to parse the
records, which can also easily be used to show your records on a web page.

The original author is Rob Kaper but since version 0.3.4 I (Radek Podgorny)
took over the maintainership as Rob is overwhelmed by work (and so am I
but I try my best). Remember, we're talking about about maintainance only.
Still, feel free to contribute anything, branching and merging is not
a problem.

## 2. Availability

You can always get the latest release from the Uptimed github repository:

https://github.com/rpodgorny/uptimed/

## 3. Acknowledgments

Uptimed was inspired by a similar utility called 'ud', but is completely
different by design. Instead of using PID files to prevent multiple
instances, Uptimed uses the system boot time to seperate log entries from
each other. This is believed to be more reliable when switching runlevels or
accidentely killing Uptimed or running multiple instances of it.

For a list of contributors to Uptimed, please read the CREDITS file.

## 4. Contacting the author/maintainer

Questions, comments, bugfixes, patches: Radek Podgorny <radek@podgorny.cz>

Original maintainer and author: Rob Kaper <rob@unixcode.org>

Contents
========

1. My platform is listed as unsupported. What to do now?
2. Support status for various platforms
3. Getting the uptime on unsupported platforms

1. My platform is unsupported. What to do now?
==============================================

First of all, do not panic. Chances are that uptimed will work on your
platform with little or no modifications.

There are basically three reasons why your platform could be unsupported:

- I have insufficient knowledge to get my code to compile,
- I have insufficient knowledge how to get your platform's uptime,
- I have insufficient knowledge of your platforms startup process and files

2. Support status for various platforms
=======================================

BSD (other than FreeBSD)
------------------------

If someone can tell me the /usr/local/etc/rc.d equivalent for other BSD
systems, these can be officially supported. Thanks!

HP/UX
-----

Uptimed now works and compiles on HP/UX (at least under 10.20) with thanks
to patches from Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>. Not being an expert on HP/UX
startup files, any help is very welcome here. Currently /sbin/rc is used:
find the following part at the end of /sbin/rc and insert the lines
commented with "insert me!".

---- /sbin/rc ----
# Output message to indicate completion
#
echo
if [ $BOOT = 1 ]; then
	echo "Creating unique uptime daemon bootid..."	# insert me !
	/usr/local/sbin/uptimed -b			# insert me !
	echo "Start uptimed..."				# insert me !
	/usr/local/sbin/uptimed				# insert me !
	echo "The system is ready."
else
---- /sbin/rc ----

3. Getting the uptime on unsupported platforms
----------------------------------------------

I have written a quick and inaccurate hack calculating the uptime from the
current time and the timestamp made at boottime.

This is very portable and thus will also let uptimed run on platforms where
I do not know of how to get the real uptime.

However, this is also very inaccurate, because:

1) the boottime timestamp can be extremely delayed due to fscking etc.
2) when the system time changes (for example timezone changes) the
   boottime timestamp does not, creating even more inaccuracy.

However, this hack should at least _work_.

If you can send me <radek@podgorny.cz> any information on how to get the
uptime on your platform, it will be appreciated very much.