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Anyone Besides Zune Owners With New Year's Crashes?

Posted by timothy on from the coincidences-abound dept.

aputerguy writes "My Fedora 8 Linux server crashed sometime between 18:59:40 EST (GMT -5:00) and 19:00:00 EST (GMT -5:00) on Dec 31, 2008 which remarkably corresponds to within at most 20 seconds of the New Year in GMT. I have been running this same hardware non-stop for more than six years and other than the occasional reboot for kernel (or distro) upgrades, it has not crashed more than 1 or 2 times in 2237 days of cumulative uptime. Nothing other than background processes were running at the time of the crash. Could this be a coincidence or was there some 2008/2009 rollover issue going on here? Has anyone (other than Zune 30GB owners) noticed similar year-end issues with their computers or electronic devices?"

21 of 480 comments (clear)

  1. nope... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    debian etch, RHEL, centos, all 300 odd servers stayed up. so did irix and solaris boxen from ancient times of the roman empire..

    1. Re:nope... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      I have a Debian box that crashed at 12 GMT. It's running ntpd and was not able to access the Internet or NTP servers during that time(possibly significant?).

    2. Re:nope... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      boxen

      Please stop using this word.

    3. Re:nope... by 1s44c · · Score: 4, Informative

      My Debian lenny laptop froze showing 00:59 (CET). Wouldn't respond to mouse, keyboard or ssh.

      Thats right when the leap second hit. Time changes can cause arts to freakout which can be nasty if it's running with realtime priority. Maybe other software does the same?

  2. I Second That by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    My parents are using a MythTV box on Fedora 8 (Athlon XP1700+) and it also froze up last night at the same time (right in the middle of a recording :-( ). That was my first thought, too, because that would have been midnight UTC. However, after restarting it today, is has frozen again.

    I can't see anything in the logs, but the recording ended at 19:59 AST. It should have kept going for another hour.

    I have a second MythTV/Fedora 8 box (P3, 1GHz) that I use and never had any trouble with it last night.

    1. Re:I Second That by aputerguy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Interesting, I run mythtv too but wasn't recording at the time of the crash. Has been stable since I rebooted a couple of hours ago.

    2. Re:I Second That by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      I did some comparisons between these 2 boxes and found the following. We were both recording the same program.

      messages - both had entries from the channel change script at about 19:29:50 AST.

      The next message on the good box was "Dec 31 19:59:59 localhost kernel: Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC." This message was not on the box that froze.

      When I stat'ed the recording, it was last modified at 19:59:59.431 -0400.

  3. Ubuntu 8.10 - MythTV Crash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I was watching the new years London celebrations on my Ubuntu 8.10 MythTV box. With 10 seconds to go to midnight, it crashed. Missed the start of the fireworks.

    I think it may have happened around midnight before, so not necessarily an New Year problem.

  4. Linux 2.6.21 hangs on leap seconds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You didn't specify your kernel version, but if it was 2.6.21, you may have hit this:

    http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux2.6.gita=commitdiffh=746976a301ac9c9aa10d7d42454f8d6cdad8ff2b

    Thankfully this was a short-lived bug which only affected 2.6.21.

  5. Re:nope by ArcticFlood · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fedora 8's end of life doesn't occur until January 7th, so it would still get timezone updates.

    --
    This is here so you don't ignore the last two lines of my posts.
  6. Re:Adding some data by aputerguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Froze - couldn't ping or ssh or get console response. I know the time cuz last maillog entry was 18:59:40 and the clock (on my emacs session) said 18:59 at time of crash. Hardware is: ASUS P4P Rebooted without ever but required me to manually poweroff

  7. Re:Errrrrrr by aputerguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I rebooted it and it went just fine. I looked at the logs and saw now errors. Last entry was in /var/log/maillog at 18:59:40 (not an error). So, not sure how to figure it out - tempted to try to replicate though by setting time back to 18:59 on 12/31/08 (and shutting off ntpd)

  8. Re:SKY TV set top box by inKubus · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's because typically Cable (or Sat) channels are contracted to carriers over a calendar year. So, at midnight on Jan 1st, some channels are added and some dropped. You probably will notice new channels and a few missing ones if you look close.

    --
    Cool! Amazing Toys.
  9. Re:Probably coincidence. by Snowblindeye · · Score: 5, Informative

    People are wired to see causality everywhere, even where there is none.

    Very true. There is an interesting book by Leonard Mlodinow called "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" which is all about the way humans misinterpret random events to see patterns that are not there.

    http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375424045

    http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0375424040

  10. Re:Probably coincidence. by Thiez · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let's use that number. The odds of a server failing during the 20 seconds before midnight on 31 december are 1 in 5 million. Suppose there are 50 millions servers. Simple math says the chance of your server crashing is extremely small (1 in 5 million), but there will be about 10 people who have a crashed server. That is normal (using your number there will be 10 servers crashing every 20 seconds every day of the year) but those 10 people will think it 'an awfully unlikely coincidence', while the other 15379200 server crashes during a year are ignored.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the new year can't have anything to do with the crash, I just think it's way more likely that your server crashed randomly and you see causality where none exists.

  11. Re:Probably coincidence. by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 4, Informative

    In 50 million servers in america (number for number's sake), that makes 10 people who crashed at midnight. Most of them were IT people given the nature of owning a server, and IT people often read slashdot.

    Hence, you, and the 7-9 other people who shared your experience... and nobody else.

    --
    while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
  12. Re:SKY TV set top box by MentalMooMan · · Score: 5, Informative

    My mythtv box (running mythbuntu) crashed within about a second of midnight as I was trying to watch the fireworks, and stopped responding to ping, ssh, everything.
    My excuse for staying in and watching the celebrations on TV is that... my dog ate... my shoes.

    Yes, that'll do...

    --
    43rd Law of Computing:
    Anything that can go wr
    fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
  13. Re:Time Mathematics and Microsoft by Purity+Of+Essence · · Score: 4, Informative

    ANSI dates are counted from 1601-01-01 and were adopted by the American National Standards Institute for use with COBOL and other computer languages. This epoch is the beginning of the last 400-year cycle by which leap-years are calculated in the Gregorian calendar. The last year of this cycle is the only one divisible by 100 that is a leap-year, which was the year 2000, and which was followed by a new 400-year cycle beginning with 2001. 32-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system count units of one hundred nanoseconds from this epoch

    Wikipedia

    --
    +0 Meh
  14. Re:Probably coincidence. by aputerguy · · Score: 2, Informative

    I only said that the last log was 20 seconds before midnight and that based on my clock display, it crashed no later than 00:00:00. I would bet any amount of money that the actual crash was at the 00:00:00 GMT changeover.

  15. Re:Probably coincidence. by aputerguy · · Score: 2, Informative

    But there are several hundred other reported crashes at precisely that moment... still a coincidence? I would bet NOT.

  16. Re:Probably coincidence. by aputerguy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ahhh but in 2005, it was running FC1 with a 2.4 kernel (I believe). So, the issue may very well not have been present 3 years ago...