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! I have root on 5 Hetzner systems which includes two MySQL instances and for some reason none of them were afflicted by this. This is getting to the level where it becomes an issue that should be of concern to national governments. 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). 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. Am Dienstag, den 03.07.2012, 14:59 +0200 schrieb info@hetzner.de:
During the night of 30.06.2012 to 01.07.2012 our internal monitoring systems registered an increase in the level of IT power usage by approximately one megawatt.
The reason for this huge surge is the additional switched leap second which can lead to permanent CPU load on Linux servers.
According to heise.de, various Linux distributions are affected by this. Further information can be found at: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Leap-second-Linux-can- freeze-1629805.html
In order to reduce CPU load to a normal level again, a restart of the whole system is necessary in many cases. First, a soft reboot via the command line should be attempted. Failing that, you have the option of performing a hardware reset via the Robot administration interface. For this, select menu item "Server" and the "Reset" tab for the respective server in the administration interface.
Please do not hesitate to contact us, should you have any queries.
Kind regards,
Hetzner Online AG Stuttgarter Str. 1 91710 Gunzenhausen / Germany info@hetzner.de http://www.hetzner.com
-- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/