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Author Topic: Need replacement for MS Uptime.exe  (Read 8397 times)

Stoic Joker

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Need replacement for MS Uptime.exe
« on: November 15, 2011, 06:01 PM »
Greetings
   For many years one of my favorite utilities has been the incredibly brilliant and tiny MS Uptime.exe. It will give the current uptime of either LM, or any machine on the network. It will also dump the event logs (local or remote) of all the shutdown/reboot/BSOD & boot events which made creating a (up)timeline a snap for troubleshooting.

  But... It was written back in 1999, and is (for whatever reason) no longer reliable. It tends to crash when trying to get a list of when/why the (local or remote) machine was rebooted.

Here is a sample of it output (run locally):

MS-Uptime.jpg

  Lacking the time to scratch write it myself, I was hoping someone knew of a comparable alternative that was currently available (that works). CLI is preferable, but I'll suffer through a GUI if I have to.

Josh

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Re: Need replacement for MS Uptime.exe
« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2011, 06:03 PM »

Stoic Joker

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Re: Need replacement for MS Uptime.exe
« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2011, 06:23 PM »
http://uptimeexe.codeplex.com/#

That's only for getting the current uptime for local machine...And it is a .NET app (total deal breaker). The absolute last thing I ever want to even consider doing is installing anything on an unstable machine, especially if it's a server.

I'm looking for something that can query both local and remote machines. And that can do a complete dump of the event log boot records (as shown above).

PhilB66

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Josh

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Re: Need replacement for MS Uptime.exe
« Reply #4 on: November 15, 2011, 06:58 PM »
Was getting ready to suggest psinfo. It works really well too. I actually forgot I could use it for that until I read about the newest sysinternals releases.

Good find Phil!

WOW! Just checked out NTToolkit, another great find! Now to make it portable!

Stoic Joker

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Re: Need replacement for MS Uptime.exe
« Reply #5 on: November 15, 2011, 08:36 PM »
NTToolkit - http://netikus.net/p...oolkit.html?SESSION=

PSTools - http://technet.micro...ysinternals/bb896649

Thanks, but neither fits the requirements.

NTToolkit is dependent on VC9 runtime files, and its uptime only does LM. I need to be able to check the uptime of a remote machine, and optionally dump the event logs for either a LM or a remote machine.

PSTools I currently already use for other things...Specifically PsExec which is incredibly handy for all sorts of things. Unfortunately PsInfo is dependent on the Remote Registry service being started on the remote machine ... And while it is relatively trivial to launch the service manually as/if needed ... It really doesn't qualify (with the extra steps) as a quick answer. It also will not dump the event logs.

The output from the screenshot above would typically only take about 2 seconds even when run against a remote machine, and its only requirement was that the target machine must be running. That is the type of quick answer I'm looking for.

Josh

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Re: Need replacement for MS Uptime.exe
« Reply #6 on: November 15, 2011, 08:43 PM »
From a command prompt

systeminfo | find "Time:"
systeminfo /s \\192.168.1.1 | find "Time:"

Stoic Joker

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Re: Need replacement for MS Uptime.exe
« Reply #7 on: November 15, 2011, 10:56 PM »
From a command prompt

systeminfo | find "Time:"
systeminfo /s \\192.168.1.1 | find "Time:"

Um...
C:\Users\Stoic Joker>systeminfo /s \\192.168.0.4 | find "Time:"
System Boot Time:          10/4/2011, 7:01:38 PM

...Yes, I am too lazy to do-the-math... :)

...Are you trying to subtly point me at the apparent fact that I'm going to have to write the damn thing myself?  :D