It's about time - October 24th to be exact

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An interesting bug set to happen - from ZD Net:
(used to be the Ziff / Davis Publishing Company)

Thanks to a nasty GPSD bug, real-life time travel trouble arrives this weekend

"Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?"

Actually, if you use computers for pretty much anything, you do. Oh, you may not know it if you're not a system or network administrator, but security, identification, networks, everything that makes the internet go depends on accurate time-keeping. Some systems rely on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) appliances and the GPSD daemon to tell the exact time, and a nasty bug's been uncovered in GPSD that's going to pop up on October 24, 2021. If left unpatched, it's going to switch your time to some time in March 2002, and your system will crash with a resounding kaboom. Here's how it works.

More at the site. The problem?

Recently it was discovered that a bug in the time rollback (aka "GPS Week Rollover") sanity checking code scheduled for November 2038 will instead trigger this Sunday, and cause 1,024 to be subtracted from the October 24, 2021 week number. In other words, a lot of computers are in for a quick, sharp visit to March 2002.

This will be ugly. Or, as Stephen Williams, who uncovered the bug put it, "I have a feeling that there will be some 'interesting moments' in the early morning when a bunch of the world's stratum 1 NTP servers using GPSD take the long strange trip back to 2002."

And this is just the little brother.  The big 'event' is scheduled to happen on January 19th, 2038 and it's a doozey.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on October 21, 2021 7:15 PM.

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