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Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so

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Re: Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so

#4
There have been patches the last ten years to lessen the impact of 2038, considering how close that is this is a bit worrisome. Nice to see a comparison of different systems like this, but you probably need to track this over time in some way. E.g Pretty sure Gnu date has seen patches about this in the last years.

Re: Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so

#6
post #3

Great blog post. Sometimes it's useful while testing to set random future and past times on Unix systems to see how programs handle that. https://blog.darkinfo.org/timestomp-for-linux/

Mongodb, for one, will freak out if you set the system date into the future, interact with it, then set time back. It will think the indices are corrupt and refuse to start. At least that happened to me last year. IIRC, the time stamp is part of generated object ids, so it’s sort of understandable. In the end I returned by computer to the future date, exported data, and rebuilt my collections.

Re: Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so

#9
post #8

ICYMI: The title is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_... ("time is an illusion, lunch time doubly so")

Also the opening paragraph, paraphrasing "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

Re: Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so

#10
post #6
post #3

Great blog post. Sometimes it's useful while testing to set random future and past times on Unix systems to see how programs handle that. https://blog.darkinfo.org/timestomp-for-linux/

Mongodb, for one, will freak out if you set the system date into the future, interact with it, then set time back. It will think the indices are corrupt and refuse to start. At least that happened to me last year. IIRC, the time stamp is part of generated object ids, so it’s sort of understandable. In the end I returned by computer to the future date, exported data, and rebuilt my collections.

So anyone can bring down Mongo with a compromised ntp server?

That's an inconvenient property to have.

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