[plug] Leap Second

[Alexander Hartner]

Hi all,

I am sure by now most of you would have come across the leap second issue from last Saturday or at least heard of it.

http://asia.cnet.com/leap-second-bug-causes-site-outages-62217305.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/02/qantas_network_down/
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479765
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/solutions/154793
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/07/01/1920217/leap-second-bug-causes-crashes
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/15145
http://artipc10.vub.ac.be/wordpress/2012/07/01/leap-second-causing-ksoftirqd-and-java-to-use-lots-of-cpu-time/

While there are many websites talking about this now and include a fix, I haven't found any dating back to Friday advising us to prepare for this. No doubt the problem lies with the websites I visit :-)

I was wondering if anybody can suggest / recommend a website which would have alerted us of this impending doom beforehand, so we can take pre-emtive action to address this. 

I am still a bit confused on what systems are exactly impacted. For example systems running oracle jdk 1.6.0_30 were not affected while other running open-jdk 1.6.0_20&24 were affected. Similarly linux running 3.1.10-1.9-default and 2.6.35.14-97.44.amzn1.x86_64 had issues while 3.1.6-gentoo did not. I suspect the problem with run-away java threads has been addressed in more recent versions of Java and is not related to the linux kernel version.

Any thoughts on this?
Best regards
Alex