Yeah, that happens. Here is an example of an actual bug opened a few years ago on our system. Dev team spend some time tracking the issue and found out incorrect variable type used for sessions, it was unsigned long used for milliseconds, like in the OP. We were joking that we need to allocate 50 days to verify the fix :) .
https://imgur.com/a/HS3fcTj
Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#52This bug reminds me of the plot of the 1996 Japanese crime story "Subete ga F ni Naru" (The Perfect Insider).
the story that makes you love an incestuous homicidal genius.
I thought the anime really glossed over that story terribly.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#53This is a myth that cannot be proven or disproven. Nobody was ever able to keep Windows 95/98 up for that long.
Jokes aside, around 2001 I was asked to do some maintenance on a machine running Windows 3.11 that was running an app to control all access within the building. When I asked about potential upgrade the guys balked at me saying the machine has couple of years of uptime and they are not very keen to have to restart it on a schedule due to windows 95/98 bugs.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#54I worked on a service that had this exact issue; actually it was worse because it was a signed integer so rolled over in half the time. Even more insidious, we never hit the issue until months into production because we had a pretty consistent two week release process. So the issue only came to light when development slowed down as the project became more stable. Luckily deployments were staggered across datacenters…
I worked at a company with a similar issue. The server is used to get patched and rebooted every month. Then the company decided to lay off huge chunks of operations staff. The software held up remarkably well, but we eventually discovered that software that was never designed to stay up for more than a month will leak memory like crazy if you leave it up for a long enough.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#5549.7 days? I wish I could get more than 7 out of my MacOS Catalina laptops before I get a gray screen.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the late ‘90’s I used to brag about my Linux uptime being over a year. And that was a system was directly exposed to the internet. I can’t imagine how many unknown security holes it had during that time.
These days it's still possible to patch and have a high kernel uptime due to in-kernel Kernel Live Patching (KLP) support. I've written a few KLP patches to solve kernel bugs without rebooting just because rebooting every system takes a long time to complete.
I'm not a systems person and pretty new using Linux, so have a lot to learn. I have Ubuntu installed on a computer here at home and recently enabled Canonical Livepatch. I also update whatever needs updating when I SSH in based on the "x packages can be updated. x updates are security updates." messages I get. Some of these require a restart. This isn't a problem for me since I'm just messing around. I'm wondering how this is done in a production environment?
I assume that a lot of the packages I update either don't need to be updated or aren't getting updated on a production server, and therefore less restarts are needed?
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree. Nobody of the readers would care about the programming error made 25 years ago in some closed source code. However, timers wrapping around is a very current problem every programmer should be aware of. Not too long ago we had a problem with corrupted video files. After weeks of investigation it turned out that some code used an 32 bit unsigned to count microseconds. Well, that wraps around after approx…
I'm a reader and care, so at least one.
Fair enough. If you stick to open source, then you can always know how programmers got it wrong in the past and present.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#58Nowadays you don't even get CLOSE to 49 days uptime before Win10 forces you to restart due to updates ;s
My laptop with Win10 is at 72 days. I created a bat file with: net stop wuauserv sc config wuauserv start= disabled and then scheduled it to run every 10 minutes. The problem with that is you now have to remember to disable it and check for updates when you have time, which I'm obviously not doing.
Useful, I may purloin that.
I don't object at all to regular reboots for security updates, but I do object to forced reboots. Windows not being safe to leave alone for 24 hours without risk of it rebooting itself makes it no better than a toy OS in my mind. And it isn't as if it is just the one monthly reboot around patch Tuesday plus the occasional emergency patch: I think I can count on one hand the number of months in the last ~two years when my main Windows machine hasn't needed to reboot twice or more in a month.
Actually I do object to regular reboots if I'm more honest, at least as many as Windows seems to need. The fact that just about any security update requires a full system reboot instead of many of them being applicable with just restarting component services smacks of bad design.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're oddly proud about not having updated your OS for 72 days.
Choices are: Allow Windows 10 auto update but for a chance for it to delete all your profile / data files PERMANENTLY : https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-k... (February 19, 2020) Or Turn off auto update with user control on when is best time to update:
Make backups, would you?
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
DEC computers were know for their reliability.
This was a generic, rack mount Intel server running Debian 3.x.
I seen now that my comment was out of context. Sorry.
I was referring to longevity in general. Back in the day, DEC computers would just about never go down. They easily had up times of longer than 5 years.