February 21st, 2000. Just over three months since the much-hyped and largely uneventful Y2K switch-over. I was feeling like we had dodged the bullet, or at least managed to stay under radar enough that it hadn’t really affected us directly. But as the day wore on, my team and I found ourselves drawn into a problem that threatened our operations once again.

Our Linux Apache servers were acting up in ways that didn’t make any sense. They kept crashing at random intervals during heavy load. The logs weren’t much help; they just showed generic messages like “server process terminated”. The sysadmins were pulling their hair out trying to figure it out, and I was no better.

I remember sitting in the server room with my headphones on, staring at the screen as the server went down again. The clock in the corner of my monitor read 10:32 AM. “Ah, good timing,” I thought. “This has got to be our Y2K problem all over again.”

But as I dug deeper, it became clear that this wasn’t a case of dates rolling over or a simple misinterpretation of timestamps. The servers were failing in ways that didn’t align with any known bug related to the year 2000 date issue.

After an hour of frustration and head-scratching, I decided to do what I always do when I’m stuck: take a step back and ask, “What’s really happening here?”

I started tracking down every piece of software running on these servers. The Apache version was 1.3.x, which wasn’t exactly the bleeding edge but had been stable enough for our needs. The Linux distribution was Red Hat 6.2, another oldie but a goodie.

One by one, I disabled all non-essential services and slowly rebuilt the system with minimal services running to see if any of them caused the server to crash. After stripping down Apache and removing some custom modules, the problem persisted. It wasn’t a service issue; it was something deeper.

That’s when I realized we needed more data. We had a log rotation script that would compress and archive old logs every night, but our cron jobs weren’t working properly under heavy load. Could this be the culprit?

I decided to go old-school: reboot the servers manually and immediately start tailing all the relevant logs with tail -f. This way, I could capture real-time data during a crash.

After another round of server crashes, I had enough information to piece together what was happening. The problem wasn’t in Apache or Linux; it was in our custom logging system that ran as part of the cron jobs. We were using /bin/sh to run commands, and under heavy load, this was failing due to a known issue with the shell’s handling of environment variables.

When I went back and switched out sh -c "command" for directly executing the command via an interpreter (like bash -c 'command'), the crashes stopped. It was a small change, but it solved a big problem.

Looking back on this experience, it’s humbling to think how close we came to having a catastrophic failure due to something so simple. This incident taught me that no matter how stable or well-tested your systems are, you always need to be prepared for the unexpected. And sometimes, even in the most mundane parts of your infrastructure, there can be hidden issues waiting to strike.

For now, though, I’m just happy that we dodged another bullet. It’s only February, and already our servers were giving us more than enough drama. But hey, at least it wasn’t Y2K this time around.

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That was a real day of debugging in 2000. Not much glory, but it served as a reminder that the most critical bugs can come from the most unexpected places.