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Oh No! Uptime gone!

by Chris on August 21st, 2006

I logged into the server this morning and hit up the ‘w’ command… I was a little shocked with the results:

[@myserver log]# w
  1:10am  up 12 days,  3:03,  1 user,  load average: 0.10, 0.09, 0.03
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU  WHAT
 pts/1    c-68-39-235-113. 12:40am  0.00s  0.38s  0.05s  w

I was expecting to see an uptime of 500+ days. As you can see there is an uptime of only 12 days! I started searching through the logs but there was nothing to indicate a system reboot or crash. After looking at some more logs for services and also seeing nothing indicating that the service had restarted, I started googling around.

It has now come to my attention that there is a bug in some older versions of the linux kernel which causes the uptime to reset after 497 days (without system reboot). I had a look at my project uptime logs and this is what I got:

1. 29.03.2005 09:39 GMT   08.08.2006 12:01 GMT   1y 132d 02h 21m 27s     
2. 08.08.2006 12:05 GMT   active session   12d 02h 55m 23s

Sure enough it had reset after 497 days (365 + 132). There are plenty of pages on the net about it if you fancy some lite reading:

Oh well, since I am now back to zippo uptime, it is probably well and truely time for a system upgrade :-)

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