Anyone Besides Zune Owners With New Year's Crashes? 480
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?"
nope... (Score:5, Informative)
debian etch, RHEL, centos, all 300 odd servers stayed up. so did irix and solaris boxen from ancient times of the roman empire..
I Second That (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Ubuntu 8.10 - MythTV Crash (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:nope... (Score:1, Informative)
I have a Debian box that crashed at 12 GMT. It's running ntpd and was not able to access the Internet or NTP servers during that time(possibly significant?).
Linux 2.6.21 hangs on leap seconds (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:nope (Score:3, Informative)
Fedora 8's end of life doesn't occur until January 7th, so it would still get timezone updates.
Re:Adding some data (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Errrrrrr (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I Second That (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I Second That (Score:4, Informative)
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:SKY TV set top box (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Probably coincidence. (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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)
Hence, you, and the 7-9 other people who shared your experience... and nobody else.
Re:nope... (Score:2, Informative)
boxen
Please stop using this word.
Re:SKY TV set top box (Score:5, Informative)
My mythtv box (running mythbuntu) crashed within about a second of midnight as I was trying to watch the fireworks, and stopped responding to ping, ssh, everything.
My excuse for staying in and watching the celebrations on TV is that... my dog ate... my shoes.
Yes, that'll do...
Re:Time Mathematics and Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Re:nope... (Score:5, Informative)
My Debian lenny laptop froze showing 00:59 (CET). Wouldn't respond to mouse, keyboard or ssh.
Thats right when the leap second hit. Time changes can cause arts to freakout which can be nasty if it's running with realtime priority. Maybe other software does the same?
Re:Probably coincidence. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Probably coincidence. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Probably coincidence. (Score:2, Informative)