?
A Shout Out to My Pepys [entries|archive|friends|userinfo]
The American Caliban

[ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ]
[ archive | journal archive ]

Links
[Links:| Dad Pinboard Last.fm Subscribe to me [Friendfeed] Flickr ]

THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD [Jun. 28th, 2006|11:34 pm]
The American Caliban
[Tags|, , , , , , , , , ]
[Current Mood |geeky]

One of our internal webservers at the office blew up. It's an intricate and bizarre hack on a little-used platform, and we're terrified of it dying because our knowledge of the internals is bad. I was pretty sad about it, and especially so because I had to fix it.

A careful search of the internet found a mailing list thread in which many, many other people had the same problem, all starting after 2006-05-12.

The thread starts here: http://www.mail-archive.com/aolserver@listserv.aol.com/msg09812.html

What turned out to be the problem? All these systems failed at the same time, exactly one billion seconds before the 32-bit Unix epoch ends in 2038. The timeouts set for database threads caused the software to look ahead, gasp in horror and died.

Ladies and gentlemen I'm in a select club of the first victims of the Year 2038 Bug.

My job is weird.
LinkReply

Comments:
[User Picture]From: dossy
2006-06-29 12:46 pm (UTC)
Hey, you work somewhere and you run AOLserver internally? Where do you work?

Don't be dissin' my AOLserver, mang. It's not as "little-used" as you may think.
(Reply) (Thread)
[User Picture]From: mendel
2006-06-29 01:39 pm (UTC)
Heh! When I read this, I thought "Hrm, I'm surprised this doesn't involve Dossy somehow." And then I saw you in the linked thread, and thought "Ah, there we go", and then came back and you're HERE TOO.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
[User Picture]From: substitute
2006-06-29 07:27 pm (UTC)
Nice kibozing; that was quick. I'm not going to say where I work because that would be kind of dumb, but we originally ran AOLserver exclusively and the startup tech people at my job were mostly ex Ars Digita, etc. We now use it for a few internal web applications.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)
(Deleted comment)
[User Picture]From: substitute
2006-06-29 09:31 pm (UTC)
I just wonder how they'll trickle in, now that I've realized things like the billion-second crash can occur. Instead of wrapping around and telling us it's 19101, these things may just... stop. Based on arbitrary constants that no one knows about. Years before anyone starts working on the problem.
(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)