Uptime
Lately, I’ve been dipping my toes in the Rails pool. It’s been a bit overwhelming, to say the least, but I’m making some headway. To get the hang of things, I decided to create a dead simple app—no more than half dozen lines.
Since switching to Linode, I noticed a display of the uptime in the admin. Curious, I investigated a bit and found that you can retrieve a UNIX machine’s uptime with a single Bash call, uptime. It returns something like this: 23:12 up 14:04, 5 users, load averages: 1.25 1.40 1.63. Sure, I could break this apart with regex and calculate the uptime myself, but there’s an easier way.
Linux has a separate file located at /proc/uptime that returns two values: uptime in seconds and idle time in seconds. With this, I could determine the number of uptime days no problem. I’ve always loved those accident signs found in factories, so I combined the two and came up with this web app.
