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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?"

6 of 480 comments (clear)

  1. Errrrrrr by segedunum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. Probably coincidence. by Thiez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > 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.

  3. test by wizardforce · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    --
    Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
    1. Re:test by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      --
      No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  4. driver by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  5. Re:Well this is obvious... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...