Users NOT servers uptime

[Phily_Baby]

I want to write some code that will maintain a list of the uptime of users' machines in a ranking chart. But to avoid users entering random values themselves (and cheating), I want to be able to extract this information from their machines, regardless of OS. So is this possible and if so how does one go about it?

Thanks

[DigitalExpl0it]

I think you cannot do this, unless you write a application that runs local then submits the info over the net into a databse..

[Phily_Baby]

Is it not possible to get it from the client machine in the same way as you get the hostname and OS version etc?

[frymaster]

there are two approaches that you can take, neither of which are very satisfactory:

1. ping them every x seconds and reset their uptime if the ping fails. this is bad because it requires the user have a static ip and that your network connection is always good. it's also a pain to run

2. write a program that the user run on their local machines that gets the uptime and then sockets or emails it to you, ie

uptime > /tmp/foo && mail -s "user's name" [e-mail] < /tmp/foo && rm -f /tmp/foo

obviously this is easy to cheat with... so it will probably need to be done in c and compiled and have some sort of verification methodology (ie a hash of the uptime for confirmation). drawbacks are that this is a serious pain to write for multiple architectures and clever users can spoof it...