On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 12:11:59AM +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
On Sun, 1 Jul 2012, Mark Trickett <marktrickett@bigpond.com> wrote:
But then the rest of us would not have had the news. I have been reading things about leap seconds, and now knowing that it can have a real impact is of value, along with that you cleared the matter by using date.
The below message which was sent out by Hetzner.de (a hosting company that provides excellent value for money and a quality service - which incidentally owns the server that runs my blog) should be of interset.
1MW for a couple of bugs which didn't even affect all servers!
another take on this would be that it's a shocking waste that these machines aren't using 1MW all the time - it means that they are basically idle and wasted. cloud is highly inefficient. those of us in HPC expect all machines to be running at ~90% of max power all the time. if they're not, then something is wrong.
I have root on 5 Hetzner systems which includes two MySQL instances and for some reason none of them were afflicted by this.
we had 2 nodes out of ~2000 that might have been affected by the leap second. very minor.
This is getting to the level where it becomes an issue that should be of concern to national governments.
WTF?! I think you must be trolling... back on planet earth -> AFIACT the bug is now understood if not fixed. inflating this to anything more than "it was a bug in linux" is tabloid sensationalism. indeed that itself is only news if you don't understand that all software over 10 lines has bugs in it.
Hetzner is only one German hosting company and there's also a lot of private computer use that has mostly idle servers (EG pretty much every corporate server I've ever run).
that is shocking. machines use ~30-50% of max power when idle. they should either be off or at max power doing useful work. anything else is a total waste. I guess virtualisation doesn't work now any better than it ever has done.
It's easy to imagine this bug as having added a few hundred MW of load to the power grid. That sort of sudden load could cause a blackout. If the systems which manage the power grid to prevent cascading failures were also hit by the same bug then it would have been particularly nasty.
servers are tiny proportion of the baseload. think of all the air conditioners and aluminium smelters out there. I believe they are at the 1 to 2% level of total power used. also if power companies can't supply to the sum of their rated substations then that would be negligent of them. they strictly regulate their substations - you can't just plug one in. major blackouts usually occur because of poor maintainance and preparation (eg. the current USA storm blackouts) componded by, storms, ice storms, geomagnetic storms, or by bugs in power company software and protocols, such as those that took out the east coast of the USA a few years ago. cheers robin