EPIPE Communications

System downtime monitoring and reporting daemon

downtimed is a program for monitoring operating system downtime, uptime, shutdowns and crashes and to record any findings either to the system log or to a separately specified log file.

downtimed is a daemon process which is intended to be started automatically from system boot scripts every time when the operating system of a server starts. First the daemon logs its findings about the previous downtime to a specified logging destination.

Thereafter the downtimed daemon just keeps waiting in the background and periodically updates a time stamp file on the disk. The time stamp is used to determine the approximate time when the system was last up and running. In case of a graceful system shutdown it records a stamp to another file on the disk. These files are used for reporting the next time the daemon starts.

This sofware works currently on recent FreeBSD and GNU/Linux based operating system distributions. It can be ported to other modern UNIX-like operating systems relatively easily.

Please see the included README file for more information.