Leap Seconds

July 2nd, 2012 by

There’s a well publicised bug in the linux kernel which makes it unhappy with leap seconds and usually Java and Mysql. If you’ve a linux box running at high CPU for no explicable reason after the leap second at the weekend you were probably affected.

The fix is,

/etc/init.d/ntp stop
date; date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`; date
/etc/init.d/ntp start

This is what it did to the power monitoring in one of our racks with a large number of affected machines.

There is a reason we allocate the whole power allocation for a server and not just the typical idle usage.