How old my Gentoo system is?

hujuice · Guru Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 336 Location: Rome, Italy

Hello everybody.

I'm able enough to have NEVER need to RE-install Gentoo from scratch in a wide range of situations.
Example: my home computer has changed, the hardware is upgraded step by step and even in case of CPU changes, I kept the system, in the worst case recompling everything.
I manage many systems and it is usual for me, even more in server oriented ones.

So, I'm curious: when did I install a system?
How can I reenact the approximate date when I built my first, stage3, installation?

Any ideas?

Regards,
HUjuice
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krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

1/ some directories create by the install : look into your /mnt for floppy... or /boot (/var, /etc... might have change while /boot... should never)
2/ if you use an ext FS than chance you never reformat it are high too: tune2fs -l /dev/rootfspath | grep created

Hypnos · Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 12:42 pm Post subject:

This is rather difficult on a Linux system, because the ext* filesystems store only the file access, change and modification dates, not the creation dates. Otherwise, you could just do "stat /var/lib/portage/world" or something.

Perhaps it's just easiest to look at when you joined the forums

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platojones · Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 12:54 pm Post subject:

genlop -l will show you the dates you emerged all of your packages, including the first emerges you did.

ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1191 Location: Austria

John R. Graham · Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 1:11 pm Post subject:

Well, the earliest lines of /var/log/emerge.log (which genlop parses) actually show you the date that the first component of the Stage3 tarball was built by catalyst, which will be at least somewhat earlier than your system install. On my oldest system, the first few lines of my /var/log/emerge.log show:

Hypnos · Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 1:21 pm Post subject:

Wouldn't logrotate kill older entries in emerge.log, just like in everything else?
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ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1191 Location: Austria

that's exactly what I pointed out earlier.
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hujuice · Guru Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 336 Location: Rome, Italy

Logs are managed/rotated, even emerge.log, so genlop has a short memory.
Also, changing CFLAGS, I did an emerge -e about one year ago.

To dig into /boot is a good idea.
Here at home, for example, I can find the symlink /boot/grub/menu.lst (2 sept 2008) that could be my last fresh installation.

Play with ls -lc and find or sort will give my oldest file.
(2 sept 2008 again)
Did I correctly managed my rsync during disk changes?

Another way (not my way) could be /etc/kernels/. But I don't have such a directory (it is managed by genkernel, I believe).

2008? I don't remember...

Regards,
HUjuice
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hujuice · Guru Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 336 Location: Rome, Italy

What I learnt (later) is that emerge.log must be kept.
I manually rotate it once a year and I keep the previous year only... :cry:

HUjuice
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John R. Graham · Posted: Sun Dec 18, 2011 2:09 pm Post subject:

hujuice · Guru Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 336 Location: Rome, Italy

My oldest file seems to be /etc/shells, April, 5, 2007.

With respect to my memory, it should be more realistc than the /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Bye,
HUjuice
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den_RDC · Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2017 10:21 pm Post subject: How old is your gentoo system...

My gentoo install is dying - after a lot of update woes due to it not being used for half a year, i've decided I will no longer try to fix it and either reinstall or use another linux distro.

On the plus side, as far as I can tell from file age and memory, this system has been rolling since 2005 and thus managed a respectable 12 year lifetime. Any older installs around ?
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eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2017 12:21 am Post subject:

I'm still using my first installed Gentoo installation from ~2004 (maybe 2003) when I decided against Fedora after RH9 went lights out, and it's still going well as a 24/7 server. Granted it's no longer on a physical machine anymore, but it was not a fresh reinstall when that hardware was decommissioned and transferred to a virtual disk on newer hardware.

The only thing over those 13-14 years that almost got me to reinstall was the apache1 to apache2 upgrade. That was painful because I had so many customizations. Alas I eventually got through it.
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fturco · Veteran Joined: 08 Dec 2010 Posts: 1181 Location: Italy

My Gentoo systems have been installed pretty recently (November 2016) even if I first started using Gentoo in January 2004. This is due to the fact that I sometimes become mentally weak and install other distributions... But I always come back to Gentoo sooner or later!

Chiitoo · Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2017 5:58 pm Post subject: ><)))°€

Running my first successful Gentoo installation from late 2010, though most of it has of course changed, and it has even moved from spinning rust to an SSD.

It also moved to using a different motherboard, CPU, and RAM (and soon back to the old for a while at least, as an RMA process is nigh).

Everything has been working very well, using 'unstable' since 2013 I think, but I may have to move to a clean, fresh-like installation soon due to an audio issue I'm having incredibly difficult time with tracking down...
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John R. Graham · Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2017 6:22 pm Post subject:

Merged above 4 posts.

- John
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eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2017 9:26 pm Post subject:

I trimmed my emerge.log so that doesn't help (I stopped trimming when my disk space problem went away). The first entry, which is truncated, is now 2009. It's clearly truncated as the first entry is 13 of 14 which is very odd. I must have flushed logs during an emerge.

Thus I still don't really have proof of 2003-2004 first install other than a few 2004 directories that were left behind from an old baselayout or something. Maybe I have something from an 8mm backup tape that probably has dilapidated beyond readability :( Making dating difficult I still have cruft from my even older RH9 and older installs dated pre 2002, which I am fairly certain that I did not use Gentoo back then.

This machine had a fairly long history, it started as a single disk system when I was first learning about Gentoo, but subsequently got migrated without reinstall to a software RAID5. It got upgraded to another software RAID5 later on, and now resides on the aforementioned virtual machine, which is still sitting on yet another software RAID5. (no plans of SSD for this machine unless it's a bcache, this machine was meant to be a shellbox/fileserver...)
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Jaglover · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 4:38 pm Post subject: Gentoo nine lives

I have an Intel NUC here, being bored I started looking at files in /var. Found some stale files. From 2007, apparently this install is ten years old now. Hmmm ... this is rather new NUC, with SSD drive. I don't remember what was the first hardware I installed it on. I think it was an Atom box after that. And then another Atom. Then I discovered some news items from Funtoo, dated 2009. Apparently I converted from Funtoo to Gentoo at some point. Every time the hardware changed I obviously chose to rebuild it with new CFLAGS and new kernel instead of fresh install. Funny, ten years of history. At least 4 different boxes, maybe 5. Who knows how many hard drives.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 5:01 pm Post subject:

Had another thread merge recently.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-905932-highlight-.html

It is faster this way to get a working system, and then later optimize it at leisure... and still end up with something similar to what you'd get when starting from scratch.
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John R. Graham · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 6:50 pm Post subject:

Merged above two posts.

- John
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Hypnos · Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 1:14 am Post subject:

Been running the same Gentoo Linux install from 2002 for personal tasks. It now lives on a VM on a Windows host, alongside a number of other Linux VMs for various dev tasks.

Of course, like Theseus's ship, it bears little resemblance to the original state ...

The earliest that any file on my system was last modified was 2005, found via:

hujuice · Guru Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 336 Location: Rome, Italy

After years, I've found a good answer for some systems, i.e. desktop systems running dbus or systems running systemd.

Ralphred · Guru Joined: 31 Dec 2013 Posts: 501

Tony0945 · Posted: Tue Feb 12, 2019 7:00 pm Post subject:

Checking 'ls -alt /mnt`, February 8, 2006
The first floor machine is March 17, 2010, although I'm sure my grandson was using it before then. Maybe with Fedora.
Basement server is July 12, 2011

First floor machine is on at least the third hard disk. Some sort of Western Digital Black -> Western Digital Velociraptor -> Crucial MX500 SSD.
It's also on it's second CPU and motherboard. Ditto for the basement. Third or fourth for the main machine. Athlon 64 Winchester (still somewhere in my basement) to Athlon II Windsor to Phenom II X6. Can't remember if there was a 64 bit install before the Athlon 64. Probably had a k6-2 32 bit, so I had to reinstall for 64 bit. I never had a k7. The Athlon II was resurrected to serve as a Windows 7 build machine, but now that I have successfully built Palemoon 28.3.1 in a Win7 virtual machine on Gentoo, I might as well retire it. It only has 2G memory and the virtual win 7 has 8G and builds much faster.

This machine dual boots, but as soon as I find a 1 TB SSD at a good price, I will switch from dual booting to running Windows XP in a virtual machine and single boot Gentoo.