The Leap Second Is Here! Are Your Systems Ready?

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 30, 2012 @10:55AM from the about-time dept.

Tmack writes "The last time we had a leap second, sysadmins were taken a bit by surprise when a random smattering of systems locked up (including Slashdot itself) due to a kernel bug causing a race condition specific to the way leap seconds are handled/notified by ntp. The vulnerable kernel versions (prior to 2.6.29) are still common amongst older versions of popular distributions (Debian Lenny, RHEL/CentOS 5) and embedded/black-box style appliances (Switches, load balancers, spam filters/email gateways, NAS devices, etc). Several vendors have released patches and bulletins about the possibility of a repeat of last time. Are you/your team/company ready? Are you upgraded, or are you going to bypass this by simply turning off NTP for the weekend?" Update: 07/01 03:14 GMT by S : ZeroPaid reports that this issue took down the Pirate Bay for a few hours.

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Irony by bughunter · 2012-06-30 10:57 · Score: 5, Funny

Leap years = no problem.
Leap seconds = kernel panic.
I fear for teh internets if we try a leap millisecond.

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I can see the fnords!
Re:Leap second got Reddit? by painandgreed · 2012-06-30 19:59 · Score: 5, Funny

Looks like Reddit's systems weren't ready for the leap second. It been down since around midnight (UTC). You'd think a site as big as that would be ready for such an event.
Have you tried truing it off and turning it on again?