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NTP Glitch Reverts Clocks Back To 2000

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-about-that-time-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems a glitch of some sort wreaked havoc on some NTP servers yesterday, causing many machines to revert to the year 2000. It seems the Y2K bug that never happened is finally catching up with us in 2012."

11 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. 2012: the end of the world! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh sorry. My clock's off.

  2. Not an NTP glitch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It was a problem with the USNO servers (I.e. tick.usno.navy.mil, tock.usno.navy.mil etc.) being rebooted and starting to hand out the wrong time. Very few downstream startum 2 NTP servers should have accepted such a large skew, although they may have lost accuracy.

    Amusingly I happen to work with an ex. USNO NTP admin, so I'll be sure to take the piss for the rest of the week.

    1. Re:Not an NTP glitch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes and no.
      This article is interesting: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884776
      Summary: Windows can do it, but before Server 2008 it defaulted to not doing any sanity checks.
      Since 2008 it still is quite generous, allowing 48 hour jumps.
      If you don't like it you have to adjust the value in the registry.
      I guess it still shows that the Internet was an afterthought for Microsoft...

  3. The Y2K bug was REAL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why do people keep pretending that it wasn't? It was a real issue, that required real work to fix. If none of that work had happened, it would've hit and it would've hit hard. Celebrate success on occasion, sheesh.

    1. Re:The Y2K bug was REAL by asdf7890 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unfortunately most of the general public think that because nothing really went wrong there was not a problem in the first place, and that it was all hyped up by the media. Some of this is the simple truth that it was over-hyped by the media who over-hype everything so people are growing desensitised, some of it is people not bothering to research their opinions or properly engage their critical thinking abilities.

    2. Re:The Y2K bug was REAL by mellon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We have a built-in bias against successful disaster planning: since the planning was successful, the disaster didn't happen, and hence to the average observer, it looks like there wouldn't have been a disaster. The reasoning is flawed, of course, but apparently very hard to resist. This is why governments are only ever harmful—if they do any good, things would have gone well anyway, so they didn't need to spend all that money and go to all that effort. This cognitive flaw is why people who do diving catches are respected, and people who plan for the future and avoid problems are ignored, and why blithering idiots keep getting control of the reins and breaking things.

    3. Re:The Y2K bug was REAL by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why do people keep pretending that it wasn't? It was a real issue, that required real work to fix. If none of that work had happened, it would've hit and it would've hit hard.

      Lots of organizations worked hard to prepare for Y2K. Lots of other organizations did absolutely nothing to prepare. Neither had any significant problems on 1/1/2000. The reason is there were very few problems to begin with. The myth was that back when memory was precious, programmers stored the year in two bytes instead of four. But those of us that actually programmed in the days when 4K was a LOT of RAM, know that we never used two ASCII chars to store a year. We used a single byte to store the offset from 1900 in binary. So there will be no overflow until 2156.

  4. 2000 ZERO ZERO by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Funny

    Party's over,
    Whoops! Out of time!

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  5. The Y2K bug by geekoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    did happen. The Y2K disaster did not thanks to a lot of money and a lot of people working to fix the bug.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    1. Re:The Y2K bug by PPH · · Score: 5, Funny

      Trust the computer industry to shorten the term "Year 2000" to Y2K.

      It was this kind of thinking that got them in trouble in the first place.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
  6. Properly configured hosts not impacted by jaredmauch · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you saw this problem, your NTP time sources were not properly configured and diverse.

    Consider using the NTP pool and not relying on so few sources to properly sync your time. Read 5.3.3 and 5.3.4 from http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/SelectingOffsiteNTPServers for help to correct your NTP setup.