On 8/9/2010 2:59 PM, Boris Epstein wrote:

Hello all,

I've got a CentOS box that became non-responsive today for some obscure reason and had to be rebooted. Is there a way to find out when it last had to be rebooted before today? uptime gives you no history past the very last reboot, so obviously I need to find some other way to get an answer to my question.

Thanks for any and all tips.

'last' should give you a history of reboots and logins. Also, an assortment of things that happen during bootup are logged to /var/log/messages.

On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Boris Epstein wrote:

Hello all,

I've got a CentOS box that became non-responsive today for some obscure reason and had to be rebooted. Is there a way to find out when it last had to be rebooted before today? uptime gives you no history past the very last reboot, so obviously I need to find some other way to get an answer to my question.

The last utility will do it:

# simple, but needs eye-parsing last reboot

# exact, but fragile if wtmp isn't old enough last reboot | head -n2 | tail -n1

but only if /var/log/wtmp is old enough. If your system rotates wtmp, then you'll have to spelunk /var/log/messages*.