Saturday, June 30, 2012

The Leap Second Is Here! Are Your Systems Ready? random smattering of systems lock up

The Leap Second Is Here! Are Your Systems Ready?
Tmack writes"The last time we had a leap second, sysadmins were taken a bit by surprise when a random smattering of systems locked up (including Slashdot itself) due to a kernel bug causing a race condition specific to the way leap seconds are handled/notified by ntp. 


The vulnerable kernel versions (prior to 2.6.29) are still common amongst older versions of popular distributions (Debian Lenny, RHEL/CentOS 5) and embedded/black-box style appliances (Switches, load balancers, spam filters/email gateways, NAS devices, etc). Several vendors have released patches and bulletins about the possibility of a repeat of last time
Are you/your team/company ready? Are you upgraded, or are you going to bypass this by simply turning off NTP for the weekend?"