Tracerouting give strange date

[dra007]

This traceroute gives odd date to an IP that cannot be reported:

Reports routes for 195.38.111.28:

routeid:2395907 195.38.96.0 - 195.38.127.255 to:abuse[at]tvnet.hu

Administrator interested in all reports

Wednesday, December 31, 1969 7:00:19 PM -0500

to abuse address from RIPE contact at request of Tamas Kolossvary. 1043523192

Wednesday, December 31, 1969 7:02:20 PM -0500

(px1nr.wp.shawcable.net)]

what's up with that?

[Farelf]

This traceroute gives odd date to an IP that cannot be reported: ...what's up with that?

Danged if I know - Kolossvary Tamas was probably with tvnet.hu in 1996 so dyslexia is about the only explanation I would hazard to guess. I don't think it has anything to do with the reportabilty or otherwise of the IP. In this copy and paste age it is easy to forget just how many two-digit transposition errors there used to be. "Add the numbers twice, if the totals don't agree and the difference is divisible by nine it's a transposition error." Heh, took me 30 years to learn that, then the computers took over. But I learned it *well*

And I might be completely wrong about the dates.

[DavidT]

It's a known problem with Macs. Take a look at this article:

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20050809005454700

A brief quote:

Solving an issue where the Date/Time setting reverts to 1969

Some users power up their Macs to find they are re-living the year of the first moon landing, with the date and time setting reverting to Dec. 31st, 1969.

and these links:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25374

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-m...ing-1969-a.html

http://forums.appleinsider.com/archive/ind...hp/t-19252.html

etc.

DT

[dra007]

Danged if I know - Kolossvary Tamas /snip

yet another oddity..Kollosvary is a hungarian name for a Transylvanian town (Cluj-Napoca) presently in Romania...with an abuse address in Hungary..thought the entire combination was amuzing, yet I was frustrated I couldn't report the dam spam...

[Farelf]

...It's a known problem with Macs. Take a look at this article:...

Now that you mention it, it is perhaps like rooster's epoch epic, finally explained by alanjshea and apart from his references, Decimal Time - Computers. Dunno how Macs get into the picture, supposedly a 'nix thing (and as described in Epoch but I guess the Apple owners know their stuff. Thing is, the -0100 to - 1200 timezones kick it back to the previous day. Not something seen by those of us in the + zones.

yet another oddity..Kollosvary is a hungarian name for a Transylvanian town (Cluj-Napoca) presently in Romania...with an abuse address in Hungary..thought the entire combination was amuzing, yet I was frustrated I couldn't report the dam spam...

But you have to love it when something so coincidence-filled raises itself out of the grey goo of the 'danelaw (no, no, I don't mean "Danelaw", I mean 'dane as in "mundane", as the fennish folk would have it). I think it must be past my bedtime, onset of delirium - yep, got to get up and go to work in an hour and a half.

[jongrose]

I've seen that date as a default start date on systems other than Macs. I remember some server problems on our forum run on a purely Linux machine that showed everyone who registered as having done so on Dec 1969, so I'm not sure what the story is on that date, but I would assume that its probably indicative of a misconfiguration somewhere.

[Farelf]

I've seen that date as a default start date on systems other than Macs. I remember some server problems on our forum run on a purely Linux machine that showed everyone who registered as having done so on Dec 1969, so I'm not sure what the story is on that date, but I would assume that its probably indicative of a misconfiguration somewhere.

(sigh)

Now that you mention it, it is perhaps like rooster's epoch epic, finally explained by alanjshea and apart from his references, Decimal Time - Computers. Dunno how Macs get into the picture, supposedly a 'nix thing (and as described in Epoch but I guess the Apple owners know their stuff. Thing is, the -0100 to - 1200 timezones kick it back to the previous day. Not something seen by those of us in the + zones.

(rooster was using a 'nix computer, Linux IIRC). Now let me see if I can fill in the fiddly bits some more. Deep in the Unix/Linux (and some Macs apparently) operating system is a fixed belief that the universe began at 0000 hours on 1/1/1970. That is because they are the product of allegedly intelligent design. Computers are told, when their internal clock is "set", how many clicks have gone by since then and the accumulated count is stored. Thereafter they add clicks (at a rate determined by their cheap little oscillators) to keep up to date. The resulting count is converted to a date-time for any service needing to display time or time-stamp anything.

Now when the accumulator of clicks loses its accumulation (usually a battery/supercap power source failure I imagine) the computer has no way of knowing any other date-time than 0000 hours 1/1/1970. It has other timing/counting functions (or it wouldn't work) but has no way to relate them to the internal clock accumulation (intelligent design?). So it remains aware of time passing but thinks it's just a terribly slow day. Between the internal clock and the date-time services it drives is the supervisory time-zone program. That tells the time stamp, display, whatever, how much time to offset +/- the default GMT/UTC time. In dra007's case that offset was -0500 which is 7pm (1900 hours) the previous day, Dec 31, 1969. Ok, there were a couple of minutes and seconds as well so it was a bit more complicated, maybe a leaky accumulator rather than totally shot. And on someone else's server or related device/application, maybe in a different time zone. In rooster's case the offset at his location was -0800 so the phantom date-time was 4pm on Dec 31, 1969. But that wasn't his computer clock as such, it was some other process somewhere, failing to secure an accumulated tick count - same principle though.

Or I could be completly wrong.