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Comment by paulfurtado | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what ended up being the root cause of the timedatectl problem?

Absolutely no idea. It just went away spontaneously which is even more worrying as that suggests the system is non-deterministic.

I don't have the error on my phone which I'm on at the moment but it threw a dbus error with no debug info.

It must be a hardware problem on your side, dude. Simple as that.

I imagine 10 years ago you would be the person complaining that GCC segfaults randomly during compiling Linux kernel, complaining that it's not "tested completely". While the segfault was caused by CPU overheating (not cooled properly) and flaky memory (causing bits to flip).

Known good HP DL380 G8 pulled from production, ECC RAM, monitoring, SAS disks, full hardware test and memtest86 pass.

Nope. Not that.

We don't buy crappy hardware or not test it.

Dude, prove it. The system should be able to exonerate itself by detecting and reporting those problems (and other systems do). At the very least, point to some actual evidence. This is the "engineering" process that the parent poster referred to elsewhere.

Just because a problem is unusual, intermittent, or only affects one person doesn't mean it's not a regular old software bug. And in my experience, it almost always is. And once you do debug it, you often (but not always) understand why it was intermittent, under what conditions it happened, and why you were the only person that saw it.

If you don't know what the problem was why are you so convinced it was systemd? Could be the kernel, could be udev, dbus, filesystem, or hardware (sorry, there is never 100% "known good" hardware).

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