Re: postgres uptime

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Tom Lane wrote:

> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)dcc(dot)uchile(dot)cl> writes:
>> Is the uptime kept internally anywhere? Or even the start time?
>
> No, and no (at least not in any globally accessible variable).
>
>> If it is, it would be quite trivial to provide access to it
>
> Not really --- in the EXEC_BACKEND case, we'd have to do something
> explicit to pass the value down to backends.

Couldn't it be stored in shared memory?

> I'd like to see more than one person requesting this (and with solider
> rationales) before it gets added to TODO. If I wanted to be picky I
> would suggest that knowledge of the server start time might be useful
> information to an attacker. It would for instance narrow down the
> number of possible starting seeds for the postmaster's random number
> generator.

Wouldn't an attacker have to have access to the server in the first place
to get that information?

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