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THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD
Jun. 28th, 2006 11:34 pmOne 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.
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.
