Re: postgres uptime

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Tom Lane wrote:

> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@dcc.uchile.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?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664