The Leap Second Is Here! Are Your Systems Ready? 284
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.
Irony (Score:5, Funny)
Leap years = no problem.
Leap seconds = kernel panic.
I fear for teh internets if we try a leap millisecond.
More important than kernel issues (Score:4, Funny)
For those wondering whether they get one more second of sleep tonight or one less, the rule is 'spring forwards, fall back, summer stand there looking confused'.
Re:Haha (Score:5, Funny)
Enjoy your free operating system that was stopped by an extra second.
Yes, because we've NEVER seen Windows have problems dealing with things like Daylight Savings...
Re:as of about a year ago, I started defensive cod (Score:5, Funny)
Our servers run on octal, you insensitive clod.
Re:Haha (Score:5, Funny)
Windows: 95. Scene: LAN party. Game: Descent. Hilarity: All the Windows users cursing loudly as their computers spontaneously reboot for DST. DOS users get to feel smug for a change.
Windows has been boning DST as long as Windows has handled your RTC.
Re:Goddamned Java (Score:3, Funny)
All my Java processes peg the CPU since the leap second, even if I restart them. Maybe a reboot will help...
So just like before, then?
Re:How is this an issue? (Score:5, Funny)
A leap anti-second?
Re:Leap second got Reddit? (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?