Displaying system uptime

[pchan]

A very simple request...I think.

Currently displayed is date/time, load, and disk%. Sometimes my system reboots and I don't even know it so it'd be nice to see a periodic update of system uptime.

[phrax]

I have a suggestion for tracking down your 'rebooting' problem. Instead of trying to determine when your machine died by looking at the video streams of ZM, you could redirect the console output of your system to the serial port and connect that serial port to another machine with a null modem cable which just logs everything coming into the serial port.

With that information, anything useful printed to the console prior to rebooting would be logged on a secondary machine and not lost in the reboot.

Alternatively, you would want to just check your uptime and investigate your logs around that time to see if anything interesting was happening. Also for monitoring, and not OS specific, you could setup a cron job (scheduled task) to ping or check a service (http,ftp,smtp,etc.) on your 'rebooting' server to see if/when it's up. That would be useful if it was happening while you're not looking.

I realize this isn't the correct forum to discuss this, but I wanted to offer my suggestions to help you determine your problem.

[pchan]

It's actually a power supply issue. Seems the voltage drops periodically hence causing the system to just reboot. I swapped out the pwr supply and it's been up for nearly 18hrs again.

[Ruler]

How would you set up that serial connection/console redirection phrax? Sounds like something that would be excellent for one of my machines - keeps kernel panicing, but only does it every few weeks. I've been writing down (by hand) as many of the error codes and debug info, but it would be nice to be able to just dump it to a file as you describe. Also, if console IO was redirected to a serial port in such a manner, I'd still be able to log into the box on a different session, correct?

Sorry to hijack your thread pchan - sounds like you've got your rebooting problem solved. Displaying the uptime is a good idea though. One of those 'cool' features that would probably be extremely easy to add.

[zoneminder]

I'll look at making the system info display customisable so you can choose which of the elements to display.

Phil