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  From: Adrian Butterworth <adrian@groc.econ-outlook.com.au>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 10:40:34 +0930

problems with clock turnover to report (what a nice problem to have)

I thought some would like to know of a problem
which may be a growing issue due to the stability of Linux.

One of my production servers "bart" has sent the
32 bit timer interupt counter round the clock.

2^32 = 4294967296 hundredths of a second => 497.1 days

The turnover occured around 10:48am 3 April 1999 local time (CST)

the /proc/uptime values and consequently uptime fail 
on april 1 barts "uptime" report was
> 10:02pm  up 495 days, 13:41,  0 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.0
uptime on Bart now falsely reports
[root@bart /root]# uptime
 11:45am  up 21 days, 57 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.35, 0.10, 0.03

Besides uptime reporting falsely:
1. cron stalled (log frozen - prior to restarting it )
   -rw-------   1 root     root      6907779 Apr  3 10:47 cron
   This effected all dependent processes, log rotations etc.
   stopping & starting cron got things going again
2. the print spooler stoped (a consequence of cron I assume)

The correct date/time however has not been effected
and I have not noticed any other problems.
Init, Sendmail, Samba, Apache etc still function fine.

Conclusion: The system appears to handle the roll over fine without requiring
a reboot. Cron will need to be stopped and started at the rollover. 

For info barts a P75 who's main role has been as a samba server for around 20
windows boxes and dialin(cyclades mux) server but runs apache and all the usual
demons. Being behind a firewall has meant there has been no necessity to upgrade
components for security. The kernel locally compiled Linux version 2.0.27 &
the rest a mix of slackware, local compiles and some redhat

Regards
Adrian Butterworth

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