Telling the Age of a System

[Bigun]

Servers should be kept in service approximately 8 years or until it's capabilities are exceeded. I bought a server a number of years ago, and for the life of me, I cannot remember when I purchased the unit. I am still running the same installation of Gentoo when I installed the unit, so there should be someway of getting a very close age of the system.

Thanks as always!

[BonezTheGoon]

I don't know, but I tried a few google searches. Best thing I found was specific to RPM's where it lists the install date. If you can remember some config file that you know you haven't replaced you could sort of glean some information that way. For instance I know I haven't updated the /etc/hosts file on one of my Gentoo boxes since its initial build and it does reflect the correct "machine build date." This isn't perfect, and it isn't what I was looking for, but it might at least meet your immediate need.

Good luck!

[timeBandit]

Assuming you have never reformatted your hard drive(s), migrated to new drives/partitions or otherwise altered the original root filesystem, this will pinpoint the date you first built the system:

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bandit@rockchuck ~ $ ls -ld /
drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 1024 2008-02-11 11:53 /

Edit: Strike that, on further thought I realized it is not accurate. This works, for ext2/3 filesystems:

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# dumpe2fs $(df / | awk '/^\//{print $1}') | grep creat
dumpe2fs 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009)
Filesystem created:       Sun Jun 25 23:29:59 2006

For a JFS root, use jfs_tune -l in place of dumpe2fs. For other FS types, you're on your own.
Another effective method is to contact the manufacturer, provide the model and serial number and ask them when it was built or sold.

[ppurka]

Look at the first few hundred lines of your /var/log/emerge.log? (as long as this file contains all the emerges till date)

Also "genlop -l | less" will show you all the emerges in a more readable format.

[BonezTheGoon]

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ls -ld /

has the date wrong on my system, and I cannot think what would have modified the date there, but it is newer than the date listed for my /etc/hosts. Just FYI.

I did find this thread of ideas you might consider looking at.

[Bigun]

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ls -ld /

and

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last

Seem to be close to matching, seems about February of 2007. So I got about 5 years left.

I wasn't worried about manufacturer's date, this was bought used, but I am treating it as new as if I bought it that way. I really couldn't afford a brand new server at the time.

[timeBandit]

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ls -ld /

has the date wrong on my system, and I cannot think what would have modified the date there, but it is newer than the date listed for my /etc/hosts. Just FYI.

Right-o, I realized about a minute after I posted that the mtime on the root directory will change when there is any change to its contents.
I edited my post with a correct command for ext2/3 and JFS filesystems.

[John R. Graham]

Look at the first few hundred lines of your /var/log/emerge.log? (as long as this file contains all the emerges till date)

Also "genlop -l | less" will show you all the emerges in a more readable format.

Nope. The first entries in that are for the builds that Catalyst does when making the stages.

- John

[mikegpitt]

Look at the first few hundred lines of your /var/log/emerge.log? (as long as this file contains all the emerges till date)

Also "genlop -l | less" will show you all the emerges in a more readable format.

Nope. The first entries in that are for the builds that Catalyst does when making the stages.

- John

On my newer laptop, this shows the correct date -- the first package being emerged was gentoo-sources. Perhaps you can look down in the list and see when you emerged your kernel sources.

Other methods:
If you don't rotate your logs you could run `head | /var/log/messages`

or

If you keep your old kernels in your /boot, run an `ls -ltr /boot`

Also, on an ext2/3/4 system, if nothing has ever been written to lost+found it should reflect the date the directory was created.

[Mike Hunt]

/var/log/emerge.log is easier to read this way:

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awk -F: '{print strftime("%D %X %Z", $1),$2}' /var/log/emerge.log | less

[ppurka]

Look at the first few hundred lines of your /var/log/emerge.log? (as long as this file contains all the emerges till date)

Also "genlop -l | less" will show you all the emerges in a more readable format.

Nope. The first entries in that are for the builds that Catalyst does when making the stages.

- John

That is why i said "the first few hundred lines"

It becomes obvious if you look at the genlop output that some of the initial entries are not from a fresh emerge (the merge times seem too close). Secondly, it seems likely that you would be using some stage3 tarball and then the tarball wouldn't be too old either (maybe at most a month off). So even if you look at those initial merges, you won't be off by too much.

[Mike Hunt]

On my boxes the emerge logs start with the very first emerge --sync
next is emerge gentoo-sources and so on ...

[eccerr0r]

I re-mke2fs'ed my server's rootfs before when I migrated from single disk to md-RAID5... I also empty my logfiles once in a while.

I ended up having to find another method of finding how old my Gentoo install was. I ended up looking for the oldest file (actually, directory, since most directory creating things tend to not touch the timestamp back to the past) on my computer and using that as the estimate for when I first installed Gentoo on that computer. Course this is still just a heuristic. And that means I'm going to hit 6 years of Gentoo next month. Few more months till 6-years on f.g.o however.

[Xytovl]

According to emerge.log my main Gentoo had it's 4th birthday yesterday at 16:20
I have also noticed there was a lot of cruft in /var/tmp/portage that dated of that time.

I think this is the most reliable way of getting the age, I have changed filesystem, recompiled everything and done almost anything stupid I could imagine.

[krinn]

i think /boot/boot from an unmount /boot should show it: early create when installing gentoo, never change by anyone as it's (almost?) unused.

[Mike Hunt]

There is an even easier way to read the emerge.log file

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qlop -l | less

[notageek]

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last wtmp

I think the limitation of this is, if /var/log/wtmp or /var/log/btmp have been erased/replaced between the first ever boot and now.

[durian]

I always install uprecords which keeps track of:

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...
    up   1335 days, 04:47:4 | since                     Thu Nov  3 18:33:14 2005
  down   199 days, 17:19:46 | since                     Thu Nov  3 18:33:14 2005

Which is when I installed the the gento I am running now, not real hardware age...

Too late for you now, but maybe your next server :)

-peter

[John R. Graham]

On my newer laptop, this shows the correct date -- the first package being emerged was gentoo-sources. Perhaps you can look down in the list and see when you emerged your kernel sources.

Huh. Looks like recent stage3 tarballs clean that out. On older ones the log of the catalyst build is present. I think the suggestion of the time of the first emerge of gentoo-sources is a good one. Something like

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qlop -l | grep gentoo-sources | head -n1

- John

[John R. Graham]

I always install uprecords...

Is that in Portage?

- John

[Mike Hunt]

... or simply

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qlop -l gentoo-sources | head -n1

[durian]

I always install uprecords...

Is that in Portage?

I thought it was, but it appears I was wrong. I must have installed it from source...

-peter

[John R. Graham]

Found it! It's app-misc/uptimed.

- John