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?"
SKY TV set top box (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My phone did it (Score:3, Interesting)
My phone froze right after midnight and i had to remove the battery to make it work again.
It's a SE w810i.
Re:Google searching (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SKY TV set top box (Score:4, Interesting)
RiteAid pharmacy y2k09 bug (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:test (Score:2, Interesting)
Amen brother.
5 of about 70 of our production servers died at exactly midnight GMT. No point in speculation until some testing is done.
Re:nope... (Score:4, Interesting)
why doesn't he just set the time back and let the new year happen all over again?
Sandisk Sansa e260 4GB Media Player (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Another anecdote (Score:4, Interesting)
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 locked up here (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Our UK production DNS systems crashed (Score:2, Interesting)
Fedora 8 bug? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:nope... (Score:3, Interesting)
That wouldn't be a conclusive test. Servers are connected to networks and have persistent storage. Unless the network behaves like it's the last seconds of 2008 GMT and the disk is in the same state as before the crash, a smooth transition is no indication that the problem wasn't date related.
Re:nope... (Score:3, Interesting)
My Debian lenny laptop froze showing 00:59 (CET). Wouldn't respond to mouse, keyboard or ssh.
Re:Adding some data (Score:4, Interesting)
A bottle rocket hitting a transformer isn't out of the question. If it hits near the high voltage terminals it may briefly arc.
Re:Google searching (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [http] or http://www.senderbase.org/ [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.
NTP and the leap second (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Amazing (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:NTP and the leap second (Score:4, Interesting)
Failing to update surely shouldn't be a matter of crashing, however. Network services do go down; it's something you plan to cope with.