Unveiling guprecords.raku: Global Uptime Records with Raku
Published at 2023-04-30T13:10:26+03:00, last updated Fri 20 Feb 21:18:46 EET 2026
+-----+-----------------+-----------------------------+
| Pos | Host | Lifespan |
+-----+-----------------+-----------------------------+
| 1. | dionysus | 8 years, 6 months, 17 days |
| 2. | uranus | 7 years, 2 months, 16 days |
| 3. | alphacentauri | 6 years, 9 months, 13 days |
| 4. | *vulcan | 4 years, 5 months, 6 days |
| 5. | sun | 3 years, 10 months, 2 days |
| 6. | uugrn | 3 years, 5 months, 5 days |
| 7. | deltavega | 3 years, 1 months, 21 days |
| 8. | pluto | 2 years, 10 months, 30 days |
| 9. | tauceti | 2 years, 3 months, 22 days |
| 10. | callisto | 2 years, 3 months, 13 days |
+-----+-----------------+-----------------------------+
Table of Contents
Introduction
For fun, I am tracking the uptime of various personal machines (servers, laptops, workstations...). I have been doing this for over ten years now, so I have a lot of statistics collected.
So I wrote guprecords.raku, a Raku script which merges the uptime stats of all my machines into one report. This post shows what it does, with some examples, plus a few notes on Raku.
Guprecords stands for global uptime records. The code is here:
Guprecords (Raku)
Goprecords (Go)
The Raku Programming Language
The Go Programming Language
Update 2026-02-20: I've since rewritten Guprecords in Go as goprecords. It's faster and easier to distribute. It does the same things (same categories, metrics and output formats) and additionally has a server mode with an API. I maintain both.
A previous version of Guprecords was written in Perl. The main reason for the rewrite was to learn Raku, Perl's younger sibling.
Over the last years, I have been reading the following books and resources about Raku:
- Raku Guide (at raku.guide)
- Think Perl 6
- Raku Fundamentals
- Raku Recipes
And I have been following the Raku newsletter, and sometimes I have been lurking around in the IRC channels, too. Watching Raku coding challenges on YouTube was pretty fun, too. However, nothing beats actually using Raku to learn the language. After reading all of these resources, I may have a good idea about the features and paradigms, but I am by far not an expert.
How Guprecords works
Guprecords works in three stages:
- 1. Generating uptime statistics using uptimed: First, I need to install and run uptimed on each host to generate uptime statistics. This tool is available for most common Linux and *BSD distributions and macOS via Homebrew.
- 2. Collecting uptime records to a central location: The next step involves collecting the raw uptime statistics files generated by uptimed on each host. It's a good idea to store all record files in a central git repository. The records file contains information about the total uptime since boot, boot time, and the operating system and kernel version. Guprecords itself does not do the collection part, but have a look at the README.md in the git repository for some guidance.
- 3. Generating global uptime stats: Finally, run the guprecords.raku script with the appropriate flags to create a global uptime report. For example, I can use the following command:
$ raku guprecords.raku --stats=dir=$HOME/git/uprecords/stats --all
That prints the full report.
Guprecords supports the following features:
- Supports multiple categories: Host, Kernel, KernelMajor, and KernelName
- Supports multiple metrics: Boots, Uptime, Score, Downtime, and Lifespan
- Output formats available: Plaintext, Markdown, and Gemtext
- Provides top entries based on the specified limit
Example
You have already seen an example at the very top of this post, where the hosts were grouped by their total lifespans (uptime+downtime). Here's an example of what the global uptime report (grouped by total host uptimes) might look like:
Top 20 Uptime's by Host
+-----+-----------------+-----------------------------+
| Pos | Host | Uptime |
+-----+-----------------+-----------------------------+
| 1. | *vulcan | 4 years, 5 months, 6 days |
| 2. | uranus | 3 years, 11 months, 21 days |
| 3. | sun | 3 years, 9 months, 26 days |
| 4. | uugrn | 3 years, 5 months, 5 days |
| 5. | deltavega | 3 years, 1 months, 21 days |
| 6. | pluto | 2 years, 10 months, 29 days |
| 7. | tauceti | 2 years, 3 months, 19 days |
| 8. | tauceti-f | 1 years, 9 months, 18 days |
| 9. | *ultramega15289 | 1 years, 8 months, 17 days |
| 10. | *earth | 1 years, 5 months, 22 days |
| 11. | *blowfish | 1 years, 4 months, 20 days |
| 12. | ultramega8477 | 1 years, 3 months, 25 days |
| 13. | host0 | 1 years, 3 months, 9 days |
| 14. | tauceti-e | 1 years, 2 months, 20 days |
| 15. | makemake | 1 years, 1 months, 6 days |
| 16. | callisto | 0 years, 10 months, 31 days |
| 17. | alphacentauri | 0 years, 10 months, 28 days |
| 18. | london | 0 years, 9 months, 16 days |
| 19. | twofish | 0 years, 8 months, 31 days |
| 20. | *fishfinger | 0 years, 8 months, 17 days |
+-----+-----------------+-----------------------------+
The hosts marked with * are still active, means stats were collected within the last couple of months.
My up to date stats can be seen here:
My machine uptime stats
Just recently, I decommissioned vulcan (the number one stop from above), which used to be my CentOS 7 (initially CentOS 6) VM hosting my personal NextCloud and Wallabag (which I modernised just recently with a brand new shiny Rocky Linux 9 VM). This was the last uptimed output before shutting it down (it always makes me feel sentimental decommissioning one of my machines :'-():
# Uptime | System Boot up
----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
1 545 days, 17:58:15 | Linux 3.10.0-1160.15.2.e Sun Jul 25 19:32:25 2021
2 279 days, 10:12:14 | Linux 3.10.0-957.21.3.el Sun Jun 30 12:43:41 2019
3 161 days, 06:08:43 | Linux 3.10.0-1160.15.2.e Sun Feb 14 11:05:38 2021
4 107 days, 01:26:35 | Linux 3.10.0-957.1.3.el7 Thu Dec 20 09:29:13 2018
5 96 days, 21:13:49 | Linux 3.10.0-1127.13.1.e Sat Jul 25 17:56:22 2020
-> 6 89 days, 23:05:32 | Linux 3.10.0-1160.81.1.e Sun Jan 22 12:39:36 2023
7 63 days, 18:30:45 | Linux 3.10.0-957.10.1.el Sat Apr 27 18:12:43 2019
8 63 days, 06:53:33 | Linux 3.10.0-1127.8.2.el Sat May 23 10:41:08 2020
9 48 days, 11:44:49 | Linux 3.10.0-1062.18.1.e Sat Apr 4 22:56:07 2020
10 42 days, 08:00:13 | Linux 3.10.0-1127.19.1.e Sat Nov 7 11:47:33 2020
11 36 days, 22:57:19 | Linux 3.10.0-1160.6.1.el Sat Dec 19 19:47:57 2020
12 21 days, 06:16:28 | Linux 3.10.0-957.10.1.el Sat Apr 6 11:56:01 2019
13 12 days, 20:11:53 | Linux 3.10.0-1160.11.1.e Mon Jan 25 18:45:27 2021
14 7 days, 21:29:18 | Linux 3.10.0-1127.13.1.e Fri Oct 30 14:18:04 2020
15 6 days, 20:07:18 | Linux 3.10.0-1160.15.2.e Sun Feb 7 14:57:35 2021
16 1 day , 21:46:41 | Linux 3.10.0-957.1.3.el7 Tue Dec 18 11:42:19 2018
17 0 days, 01:25:57 | Linux 3.10.0-957.1.3.el7 Tue Dec 18 10:16:08 2018
18 0 days, 00:42:34 | Linux 3.10.0-1160.15.2.e Sun Jul 25 18:49:38 2021
19 0 days, 00:08:32 | Linux 3.10.0-1160.81.1.e Sun Jan 22 12:30:52 2023
----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
1up in 6 days, 22:08:18 | at Sat Apr 29 10:53:25 2023
no1 in 455 days, 18:52:44 | at Sun Jul 21 07:37:51 2024
up 1586 days, 00:20:28 | since Tue Dec 18 10:16:08 2018
down 0 days, 01:08:32 | since Tue Dec 18 10:16:08 2018
%up 99.997 | since Tue Dec 18 10:16:08 2018
Conclusion
Guprecords is a small tool, but writing it made me like Raku a lot. The language is very expressive; you can say what you mean in very few lines.
Multiple paradigms, grammars, lazy evaluation: there is a lot in there.
So far, I have only scratched the surface of what Raku can do. I hope to find more time to become a regular Rakoon (a Raku Programmer). I have many Ideas for other small tools like Guprecords, but the challenge is finding the time. I'd love to explore Raku Grammars and also I would love to explore writing concurrent code in Raku (I also love Go (Golang), btw!). Ideas for future Raku personal projects include:
- A log file analyzer, for generating anonymized foo.zone visitor stats for both, the Web and Gemini.
- A social media sharing scheduler a la buffer.com. I am using Buffer at the moment to share posts on Mastadon, Twitter, Telegram and LinkedIn, but it is proprietary and also it's not really reliable.
- Rewrite the static photo album generator of irregular.ninja in Raku (from Bash).
E-Mail your comments to hi@foo.zone :-)
Other related posts are:
2025-11-02 Perl New Features and Foostats
2023-05-01 Unveiling guprecords.raku: Global Uptime Records with Raku (You are currently reading this)
2022-06-15 Sweating the small stuff - Tiny projects of mine
2022-05-27 Perl is still a great choice
2011-05-07 Perl Daemon (Service Framework)
2008-06-26 Perl Poetry
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