September 16, 2002

Oh boy, was it just the other day when everyone was worried about Y2K? Now here we are, a mere two months into 2002, and I’m still dealing with some of those quirks that no one thought would stick around. Let me tell you about my latest adventure in ops land.

You see, at our little startup, we were running a mix of Linux servers for everything from web services to database backends. We had a small team of developers who were all excited about the transition from Red Hat 6.x to Red Hat 7. We thought it would be smooth sailing—after all, wasn’t Red Hat 7 supposed to have better security and stability? Well, not exactly.

One fine morning, I woke up to a series of panicked emails from our ops team. “Something’s wrong with the database server,” one read. “It seems to be crashing every hour on the hour.” Now, in ops land, when something crashes at regular intervals, it usually means something is misconfigured or there’s a cron job that needs fixing.

I quickly fired up my terminal and connected to our production servers via SSH. The first thing I did was check the logs. It didn’t take long to find what looked like a cron job triggering a nightly backup script. But here’s where things got interesting: this script wasn’t a standard one—it was an old, custom-built tool that we had been using for years.

The problem turned out to be in the way it handled dates and times. You see, Red Hat 7 had changed its date handling routines slightly, which meant our backup script didn’t work as expected. Instead of backing up at midnight, it was trying to back up every hour on the hour! I could hear the collective groan from the ops team over my terminal.

It was a reminder that even in an era where Y2K concerns were largely behind us, we still had to be vigilant about how our systems behaved under different conditions. It’s funny how old code can bite you when you least expect it.

We spent the next few hours debugging and reconfiguring the script. In the process, I had a chance to reflect on just how much has changed since Y2K. Back then, everyone was worried about dates rolling over in 2000. Now, we are dealing with subtle bugs that can crop up due to changes in system libraries.

This experience also brought back memories of early discussions around IPv6. While the transition seemed slow at the time, it’s clear now how critical IPv4 addresses were becoming. The fear of running out was real, and while we didn’t implement IPv6 fully on our servers yet, we started planning for a future where it would be necessary.

But back to today’s problem. We fixed the backup script, but not before everyone gave me a good ribbing about being old enough to remember Y2K. I just shrugged and smiled, knowing that no matter how much technology changes, some of us will always look at the clock as if it’s 1999.

That evening, as I typed up my bug fix and committed it to our code repository, I couldn’t help but feel a mix of nostalgia and resolve. Nostalgia for the days when everyone was scared about Y2K, and resolve to ensure that we are always ready for whatever quirks come our way in 2002 and beyond.

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It’s funny how the tech world can be full of surprises. Here I am, dealing with a backup script issue from the olden days, while all around us, new technologies like VMware were starting to take hold. But hey, at least it keeps things interesting!