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Anyone Besides Zune Owners With New Year's Crashes?

Posted by timothy on Thu Jan 01, 2009 03:01 PM
from the coincidences-abound dept.
Software
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?"
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[+] IT: Microsoft Zunes Committing Mass Suicide 785 comments
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Submission: Anybody (other than Zune) have 1/1/09 crashes? by aputerguy (692233)
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Anyone Besides Zune Owners With New Year's Crashes? 50 Comments More /

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  • Well (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:04PM (#26292647)

    Well, you know what they say, this wouldn't have happened with Red Hat.

  • SKY TV set top box (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:05PM (#26292655)

    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.

    • Re:SKY TV set top box (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Thanster (669304) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:19PM (#26292799)
      Replying to myself, as I forgot my login details briefly. Sky tv set top box crashed precisely at midnight (was sadly watching the newyears TV stuff. Had to switch over to the old fashioned arial to watch the london fireworks. Did this happen to anyone else (thinking unlikely to find many people willing to admit watching the newyear on tv!) (personal excuse is having a young child!)

    • Re:SKY TV set top box (Score:5, Funny)

      by sentientbeing (688713) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:49PM (#26293063)

      A similar thing, though probably unrelated to the leap second - my parents VHS clock has been flashing 12:00 since 1986.
      It would probably bring bad luck for the new year to set it correctly for 2009, so I think ill leave it.

    • Re:SKY TV set top box (Score:5, Informative)

      by inKubus (199753) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:57PM (#26293137) Homepage Journal

      That's because typically Cable (or Sat) channels are contracted to carriers over a calendar year. So, at midnight on Jan 1st, some channels are added and some dropped. You probably will notice new channels and a few missing ones if you look close.

  • Well, after drinking a couple of beers (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:06PM (#26292665)
    I let a bottle fall and it broke. Does it count?

  • nope... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:07PM (#26292669)

    debian etch, RHEL, centos, all 300 odd servers stayed up. so did irix and solaris boxen from ancient times of the roman empire..

  • No. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:08PM (#26292675)

    No.

    You are alone. Very, very alone.

  • Well this is obvious... (Score:5, Funny)

    by oskard (715652) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:08PM (#26292679)
    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.

  • No problems (Score:5, Funny)

    by sdo1 (213835) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:10PM (#26292699) Journal

    Nope. Everything's fine here in New Ampst

    <carrier lost>

  • Errrrrrr (Score:5, Insightful)

    by segedunum (883035) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:11PM (#26292707) Homepage
    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?

  • Probably coincidence. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thiez (1281866) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:12PM (#26292715)

    > 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.

    • Re:Probably coincidence. (Score:5, Funny)

      by DoofusOfDeath (636671) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:27PM (#26292899)

      Yes. People are wired to see causality everywhere, even where there is none.

      So you see a pattern in people's behavior? ;)

    • Re:Probably coincidence. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Snowblindeye (1085701) on Thursday January 01 2009, @04:03PM (#26293183)

      People are wired to see causality everywhere, even where there is none.

      Very true. There is an interesting book by Leonard Mlodinow called "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" which is all about the way humans misinterpret random events to see patterns that are not there.

      http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375424045 [randomhouse.com]

      http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0375424040 [amazon.com]

      • Re:Probably coincidence. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Thiez (1281866) on Thursday January 01 2009, @04:07PM (#26293203)

        Let's use that number. The odds of a server failing during the 20 seconds before midnight on 31 december are 1 in 5 million. Suppose there are 50 millions servers. Simple math says the chance of your server crashing is extremely small (1 in 5 million), but there will be about 10 people who have a crashed server. That is normal (using your number there will be 10 servers crashing every 20 seconds every day of the year) but those 10 people will think it 'an awfully unlikely coincidence', while the other 15379200 server crashes during a year are ignored.

        Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the new year can't have anything to do with the crash, I just think it's way more likely that your server crashed randomly and you see causality where none exists.

      • Re:Probably coincidence. (Score:5, Informative)

        by O('_')O_Bush (1162487) on Thursday January 01 2009, @04:08PM (#26293223)
        In 50 million servers in america (number for number's sake), that makes 10 people who crashed at midnight. Most of them were IT people given the nature of owning a server, and IT people often read slashdot.

        Hence, you, and the 7-9 other people who shared your experience... and nobody else.

  • Given an infinite number of server monkeys... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by melonman (608440) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:13PM (#26292733) Journal
    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.

  • I Second That (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:14PM (#26292741)

    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.

    • Re:I Second That (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:51PM (#26293087)

      I did some comparisons between these 2 boxes and found the following. We were both recording the same program.

      messages - both had entries from the channel change script at about 19:29:50 AST.

      The next message on the good box was "Dec 31 19:59:59 localhost kernel: Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC." This message was not on the box that froze.

      When I stat'ed the recording, it was last modified at 19:59:59.431 -0400.

    • Re:I Second That (Score:4, Insightful)

      by athakur999 (44340) on Thursday January 01 2009, @04:08PM (#26293211) Homepage Journal

      My Mythbuntu-based HTPC also froze up last night.

      This is what my /var/log/messages file looks like:
      Dec 31 16:03:45 puppet -- MARK --
      Dec 31 16:23:45 puppet -- MARK --
      Dec 31 16:43:45 puppet -- MARK --
      Dec 31 17:03:45 puppet -- MARK --
      Dec 31 17:23:45 puppet -- MARK --
      Dec 31 17:43:45 puppet -- MARK --
      (... below is when I noticed the box was hung and restarted it ...)
      Jan 1 14:02:31 puppet syslogd 1.5.0#2ubuntu6: restart.
      Jan 1 14:02:31 puppet kernel: Inspecting /boot/System.map-2.6.27-9-generic

      Every 20 minutes, I get those "-- MARK --" messages and the last one is at 5:43PM local time which would be 11:43PM UTC (also my system clock is set to UTC, not local time). The next "-- MARK --" should have been at 12:03AM UTC, so there's a good chance the leap second messed something up.

  • test (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wizardforce (1005805) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:16PM (#26292765) Journal

    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

  • RiteAid pharmacy y2k09 bug (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:26PM (#26292879)

    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

  • Mysteriously coincidental with this event.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by vorlich (972710) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:27PM (#26292891) Homepage Journal
    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 ...

  • Crashy box crashes, you say? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Yath (6378) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:38PM (#26292975) Journal

    it has not crashed more than 1 or 2 times in 2237 days of cumulative uptime

    Apparently, you have pre-existing stability problems with this box. The fact that it crashed yet again yesterday should come as no great surprise.

  • Linux 2.6.21 hangs on leap seconds (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:38PM (#26292981)

    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.

  • Fedora 8 locked up here (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AZPolarBear (661815) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:46PM (#26293037)
    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.

  • Anyone With New Year's Toast Accidents (Score:4, Funny)

    by david_craig (892495) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:47PM (#26293045) Homepage
    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?

  • 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.

         

    • Another anecdote (Score:4, Interesting)

      by CustomDesigned (250089) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:39PM (#26292991) Homepage Journal

      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).

    • Re:Adding some data (Score:5, Informative)

      by aputerguy (692233) on Thursday January 01 2009, @03:42PM (#26293015)
      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

    • Re:Time Mathematics and Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ThePhilips (752041) on Thursday January 01 2009, @05:05PM (#26293695) Homepage Journal

      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.

          • Re:Time Mathematics and Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)

            by Purity Of Essence (1007601) on Thursday January 01 2009, @07:25PM (#26294999)

            ANSI dates are counted from 1601-01-01 and were adopted by the American National Standards Institute for use with COBOL and other computer languages. This epoch is the beginning of the last 400-year cycle by which leap-years are calculated in the Gregorian calendar. The last year of this cycle is the only one divisible by 100 that is a leap-year, which was the year 2000, and which was followed by a new 400-year cycle beginning with 2001. 32-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system count units of one hundred nanoseconds from this epoch

            Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

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