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cestith 4 days ago

Once upon a time, Windows NT 4 had a similar bug. Their counter was high precision, though, and was for uptime of the system. Back before Service Pack 3 (or was it SP2?) we had a scheduled task reboot the system on the first of the month. Otherwise it would crash after about 42 days of uptime, because apparently nobody at Microsoft tested their own server OS to run for that long.

abbeyj 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Are you thinking of https://web.archive.org/web/19990508050925/http://support.mi... ? Or was there a different bug in NT 4?

cestith 3 days ago | parent [-]

This was definitely NT. It was the IIS server at an ISP. It might have been the same timer, and it might’ve been 49 days instead of 42. Its was in the forties, and 42 sticks in my mind pretty easily. It may have been basically the same bug.

UPDATE: Apparently it was 49.7 days in NT, same timer bug as 9x. Only remember this was a server OS. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/86jxva/anyone_rem...

That, or the Reddit poster and I have the same wrong memory of the bug. I do know my boss at the time made us make the scheduled task to reboot because he understood it at the time to happen on NT 4.

minki_the_avali 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> about 42 days About 42 sounds a bit too low, if this really was a timer overflow from a 16 bit timer it would have to be around 49 days