EPIPE Communications

System downtime monitoring and reporting tool

downtimed is a program for monitoring operating system downtime, uptime, shutdowns and crashes and for keeping record of such events.

downtimed(8) 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 as well as in a database file which can be displayed with downtimes(1) command.

Thereafter the downtimed(8) 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.

downtimes(1) is a command-line tool which can be used to inspect previous downtime records recorded in the downtime database file.

This sofware works currently on recent FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris based operating system distributions. It can be ported to other modern UNIX-like operating systems relatively easily. The software is available under Simplified BSD license.

Please see the included README file for more information.

News and updates since last version

• Sample startup script for Debian.
• Sample startup script for Red Hat (RHEL/Fedora/Scientific Linux/CentOS/etc.)

New versions

If you wish to receive a notification whenever a new version of this software is released, you may wish to subscribe at the project's Freshmeat page. There is also a page which contains a brief summary of changes in each version.

A more detailed list of changes in each version is available in the NEWS file included in the distribution.

A detailed view of every change in the development tree is available at the downtimed Bazaar repository at Launchpad.

Articles

• Ubuntu Geek published the first article about downtimed.
• Linux Journal reviewed downtimed in issue #202/February 2011.

Ports and binary packages

The following operating system and distribution specific ports and packages are available. Consider using one of them if one exists already for your operating system and distribution. Using a tailored port/package makes installation and upgrading easy.

• downtimed is included in Ubuntu starting from 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) in the universe repository. The package can be installed in the usual way:

  sudo apt-get install downtimed

  It probably works fine on some older Ubuntu releases as well.
• Pre-built binary packages for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (lucid), Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick) and Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) are available at Launchpad PPA. You can install the package as follows:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:snabb/downtimed
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install downtimed
  

• Ubuntu packaging source (for using with debuild) is available:

  bzr branch lp:~snabb/downtimed/ubuntu
  

• FreeBSD port is available in /usr/ports/sysutils/downtimed/. It is also available through Bazaar:

  bzr branch lp:~snabb/downtimed/freebsd
  

• OpenBSD port is available.
• GNU/Debian package is available (currently only in sid/unstable and wheezy/testing distributions but the package works fine with 6.0 squeeze).
• Arch Linux package is available at AUR.

Development version

• The development version of this software is available at Launchpad. You can get your own branch of the development source tree with Bazaar VCS with the following command:

  bzr branch lp:downtimed