Re: Weirdness with init

Steve wrote:

> Just wondering if anyone has ever seen something like this before. I
> have a Debian Etch system running a custom kernel based off of stock
> kernels from kernel.org. The system was upgraded from Sarge to Etch and
> because of the custom kernel wasn't rebooted. That upgrade took place
> months ago and every was running smoothly.
>
> Today I noticed when running the 'uptime' command that the uptime was
> listed as 2 days 6 hours and some change. I was expecting to see
> something close to 500 days. I investigated all of the logs and could
> find absolutely no evidence of a reboot. The system is fairly heavily
> monitored so I would've seen at least one or two e-mails from the
> reboot. I also have no reason to believe, based on the initial
> investigation, that there is anything malicious involved.
>
> Running ps, it looked like init and related processes all had a
> timestamp of Jan 4, two days ago. A few other processes had a timestamp
> of just '2009' while most had a 'correct' (or sane) timestamp.
>
> I'm trying to think of logical reasons for this to have happened. Was
> there possibly an update that did something to init or related? Could
> there have been a problem with the hardware clock on the server
> temporarily? Could something have gone wrong with ntpd that asjusted
> the time and then corrected itself? Was the uptime just sufficiently
> long enough that something rolled over? (It's a fairly heavily used
> server.)
>
> Anyone else seen something similar or have other thoughts?

Older kernels have a bug where the uptime rolls over after about 497 days (2^32 hundreds of a second). This would explain the low uptime your server reports. I currently have no access to such a system, so I don't know if this also can explain the other symptoms you're seeing.

-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-isp-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org