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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?"
Well, you know what they say, this wouldn't have happened with Red Hat.
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.
I let a bottle fall and it broke. Does it count?
debian etch, RHEL, centos, all 300 odd servers stayed up. so did irix and solaris boxen from ancient times of the roman empire..
No.
You are alone. Very, very alone.
My Microsoft Windows desktop 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 5 hours and other than the occasional BSOD and Windows updates, it has not crashed more than 1 or 2 times in 174,237 seconds of cumulative uptime. Nothing other than spyware, malware, and System Idle Process were running at the time of the crash.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Nope. Everything's fine here in New Ampst
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
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?
My phone froze right after midnight and i had to remove the battery to make it work again.
It's a SE w810i.
> 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.
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.
Virtually serving coffee
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.
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.
As far as I've been able to tell, this means that there have been a lot of requests from your subnet, enough that it looks like some sort of bot.
The Zune crash was due to a specific hardware driver. Perhaps you also have an unusual hardware driver on your setup that was affected?
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.
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
my cat hid under the bed at almost 25 seconds into the New Year. Right after he heard the first of the fireworks. However he did restart normally about 22 minutes later after a soothing saucer of milk. I wonder if ...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
I had purchased a Sandisk Sansa e260 4GB Media Player for my father-in-law for x-mas and it worked on thru the 30th, but it wouldn't turn-on on the 31st all day. We finally managed to turn it on today. Interesting...
Apparently, you have pre-existing stability problems with this box. The fact that it crashed yet again yesterday should come as no great surprise.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
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.
I switched from Windows 95 to RedHat 6.2 many years ago, and except for reboots to upgrade the hardware (started with 200Mhz Pentium I w/ 384M and now have Dual Core w/ 2G) or OS (now on CentOS 5.2), it has crashed only twice - due to a defective USB2.0 card which I replaced.
We run LTSP so that the single server runs the entire family, using old '90s hardware for thin clients. We simply could not afford to run Windows (or Mac).
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.
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
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.
My toast got burnt sometime between 9:59:40 EST (Eastern Standard Time in New South Wales, GMT +10:00) and 10:00:00 EST (GMT +10:00) on Jan 1, 2008 which remarkably corresponds to within at most 20 seconds of the New Year in GMT. I have been making toast with this same wetware non-stop for more than twenty six years and other than the occasional lapse in concentration while speaking on the phone, I have not burnt toast more than 1 or 2 times in 2237 days of cumulative toasting. Nothing other than background processes were running through my mind at the time of the burning. 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 while operating toasters or electronic devices?
My Fedora 8 and Fedora 10 machines did not experience any problems. Maybe you had a power glitch, if there's nothing in the logs.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
On Debian, RHEL, Centos & Boxen! On Irix, Solaris, Ibex & Vixen!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Madplayer hicked three times at about 0100 CET. I thought it might have been my RAID system I had just repaired. (There was a bad sas/sata controller.) This happened over about 20 seconds. I only use Unix/Unix-like systems and to the best of my knowledge there are no embedded MS devices in this house.
Unix/Linux, etc. handles things like this well. All time sync services like NTP, DCF-77, MSF, WWVB, GPS and the rest give fair warning. I personally are in favour of ditching 'leap seconds'. Time corrections would best be made day to day, the length of today being based on yesterday. That's better, but surely someone can think up the real solution?
BillSF
PS: Frequent updates to Java caused by US daylight saving time are pathetic.
After some google searching, at least some of these issues may be attributable to a bug in the Linux code that handles the leap second. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/7/3/103 http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff;h=746976a301ac9c9aa10d7d42454f8d6cdad8ff2b
Interestingly enough I saw exactly the same. Two of our production servers running fedora 8 crashed exactly at 01:01:02 GMT+1. I am beginning to suspect that this must be a Fedora 8/NTP-related bug...
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Trying for some flip geek cool (if such a thing could ever actually exist) merely shows ignorance
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer says hi. You might not be able to hear him, though I don't know whether to blame the fact that the joke went miles over your head, or that you're wearing your asscheeks as earmuffs.
Perhaps it is the leap second that is coursing problems for computers using NTP and other time servers
null
A bottle rocket hitting a transformer isn't out of the question. If it hits near the high voltage terminals it may briefly arc.
I think you were given a very badly infected "zombie" machines IP by your IP provider overnight.
If you give your IP to sites like http://http//www.completewhois.com or http://www.senderbase.org/ they may give very good clue since zombies mostly end up on such lists. Of course if you aren't victim of some sort of monopoly, it is best to find a better managed ISP with zero tolerance to both spammers and zombies on their subnet. Not every IP address/block is equal on web since the early dial up times. At one time, while I was using cable ISP, I had 5 kb/sec virus/worm traffic hitting me while I am using OS X. It really bugged me a lot and eventually sites like slashdot really went paranoid about my IP and I was disallowed from posting once.
Wikipedia
+0 Meh
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.
Done:
$ perl -MHTTP::Date -e 'print time2str(1230796800)';
Thu, 01 Jan 2009 08:00:00 GMT
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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
I thought there was no way that Y2K9 would affect me, then the girlfriend asked me to check on a flight for her--and I found that United Airlines' website returns 2008 flight data if you search for flight information for Jan. 1 or Jan. 2 2009! How amateur is that?
~Ben