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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?"
Here in the UK, our skytv settop box crashed (lost all tv channels but not the menus precisley at 00:00 1/1/2009 needed a cold boot to get the channels back.
On 12/30/08, I submitted a request with my pharmacy to refill a prescription to pick up on 12/31/08, and received the following email, verbatim:
Your Rite Aid prescription confirmation
Greetings from the riteaidonlinestore.com pharmacy,
Thank you for choosing to refill your Rite Aid prescription(s) online at the riteaidonlinestore.com pharmacy.
The following refills have been sent to the Rite Aid store that you selected, along with your preferred pick-up date and time:
Patient Name: ********
Rx ******** ********
Rx ******** ********
Rite Aid Store Location:
********
********, ********
********
********
Pick-up Date and Time:
Thursday December 31, 2009 at 3:00 pm
If you have any questions regarding your prescription, please contact your local Rite Aid directly at ********. Please note that you will need to pay for this prescription when you pick it up. If you have selected to self-pay for this medication, you will pay Rite Aid's price.
Thank you for visiting the riteaidonlinestore.com pharmacy. We invite you to visit us for your other prescription needs and great deals on nonprescription items. We look forward to assisting you!
Some things to note: I've got to wait until next christmas to pick up my drugs, and they were so concerned about patient privacy, they obscured all my contact information, prescription numbers and the pharmacy's phone numbers with asterisks. (I didn't do that myself!)
So, I wonder if their log files are full of java.lang.Exception logs today...
--ob
why doesn't he just set the time back and let the new year happen all over again?
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
My Fedora 8 system locked up after the leap second update was logged at 00:00 UT. I was my DHCP server, so the network went down.
A surprising number of NTP servers didn't add the leap second correctly. On the mailing list for pool.ntp.org contributors, it was reported that at just after midnight UTC that about 158 servers in the pool (about about 2000) were reporting times that were around 1000ms off. A few hours later it was only 13 that were doing that.
My own (stratum 3) NTP server got confused and declared that it couldn't determine the correct time. Some of its sources were 1000ms off from others. Given enough time, NTP will sort itself out, but I intervened manually by ditching the upstream servers that hadn't gotten it right.
If enough NTP servers were temporarily in the state that mine was in (was so unsure of itself that it wouldn't serve time to clients) then I could imagine some process that tries to sync the time and fails because ntpdate doesn't return anything useful.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky