Crashing servers
 

We were hit by the leap second bugs in the Linux Kernel. I've written up my experience on our technical blog.

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/07/03/a...aping-seconds/

Original post here below:

We're having a really bad day of crashing spam scanning servers. Mostly users won't see any issues, apart from slight delays (5-10 minutes) on incoming emails when one of the servers crashes.

Interestingly, it seems to not just be us - other departments in Opera are having failures too. At first we suspected the specific hardware, but we've had crashes on other equipment too. It might be a rough day.

On the plus side, our robust failover systems are working fine :) The process for dealing with a failed server is now so easy I can do it from my phone in ~30sec.

Getting some press!

http://serverfault.com/q/403732/8453
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182642

And I think we're all fixed now :)

Bron, Amazon.com has been getting bad press today due to the combination of record high temperatures and high winds taking out utilities in the eastern US. Maybe their attempts at redirecting traffic were thwarted by server bugs.

Did this indeed turn out to be a time rollover bug?

Bill

Yes. it did.

I've updated the original post of this thread to link to the technical blog, and pointed the technical blog here. Nice and cirular!

I liked the long blog post you wrote about. Very entertaining...
(and thanks for handling this issue so well)

Nice and what??:p

Circular. The missing c was probably typed during a leap second and got lost...

I'm relaxing by the C right now...

Bron must have been listening to the crashing servers: :rolleyes:
Broken Cirular Logic

Bill