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

Errrrrrr

[segedunum]

Why don't you actually boot it, or failing that, take the hard drive out, perhaps look at some logs and actually find out rather than aligning it with a certain set of mystical circumstances?

Probably coincidence.

[Thiez]

> Could this be a coincidence

Yes. People are wired to see causality everywhere, even where there is none. Had your server crashed a week ago you wouldn't think anything of it (maybe 5% of all servers mysteriously crashed exactly one week ago, but because it was an 'ordinary' day nobody noticed). Anyway, since you noticed your server crashed at new year and reported it on /., and with 6 billion people on this planet we will soon hear stories about other computers that mysteriously crashed around midnight. Not because there has to be anything special, but because computers are crashing all the time and new year (and your post) made it appear special.

I doubt it has anything to do with leap seconds, if your computer ran for 6 years it survived the leap second of 2005.

Re:Probably coincidence.

[AbyssWyrm]

I think your logic is incorrect. The original poster did not say "my server went down around midnight, could this be a coincidence?" rather he said "my server, which has a particularly excellent track record of not going down, did so near midnight with very high precision. Could this not be a coincidence?" Given that this happening at any specific time is very unlikely compared to the relative abundance of rollover errors, this is a very legitimate hypothesis. Furthermore your argument is essentially saying that anything with a non-zero probability of occurring randomly is probably not a coincidence. Otherwise, instead of comparing to some 50 million servers you ought to be comparing to a much smaller number of servers meeting the description of the original poster's. I don't think you pose any legitimate argument that this is coincidental, and it strikes me as very probable that it is not.

Given an infinite number of server monkeys...

[melonman]

How many servers in total are watched over by people posting on Slashdot? I suspect that the answer is high enough that it would be amazing if at least one of them didn't crash within 20 seconds of the New Year.

test

[wizardforce]

Could this be a coincidence or was there some 2008/2009 rollover issue going on here?

set the system time back a few mins before the crash occured and see if your server crashes again... otherwise it's idle speculation

Re:test

[$RANDOMLUSER]

First good idea in this whole discussion. Don't forget the hardware clock as well.

driver

[TheSHAD0W]

The Zune crash was due to a specific hardware driver. Perhaps you also have an unusual hardware driver on your setup that was affected?

Re:Well this is obvious...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with all the 4chan idiocy on Slashdot recently?
4chan is funny when you're a teenage boy, but for those of us that aren't...

Re:Time Mathematics and Microsoft

[ThePhilips]

Try once yourself to code conversion from "seconds since 1/1/1970 00:00:00" to any other user digestible presentation.

It's not as easy as it might seem.