Anyone Besides Zune Owners With New Year's Crashes?

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?"

Comments

nope...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Linux 2.6.21 hangs on leap seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Adding some data

[aputerguy]

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

Re:Errrrrrr

[aputerguy]

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)

Re:Probably coincidence.

[Snowblindeye]

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

Re:Probably coincidence.

[Thiez]

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.

Re:SKY TV set top box

[MentalMooMan]

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...