Re: [Summary-Talk] Mysterious Dates

[Jason Linhart <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Varian wrote:
> I had thousands of strange entries.  For example, here is a snip
> of my daily visitors report:
> 
> 01/17/38         0         0         0         0         0B         0
> 
> I tried downgrading back to 2.5, thinking maybe I had a corrupt log
> file that 2.5.5 now was seeing, and I found that these mysterious
> dates were still there.
> 
> I then upgraded back to 2.5.5 and set a hard starting date of 1/1/04,
> hoping it'd just ignore them, that didn't have an effect.

You should check the Log Files report, which shows starting and ending
date for each log file, to see which log file is giving the strange
dates. There is presumably something wrong with one of your log files,
though it is possible that several are involved.

01/17/38 is the 17th of January, 2038. So setting a starting date won't
help. If you are not in incremental mode you can set an end date in say
2010 and that would filter out those entries. In incremental mode the
end date is ignored.

2038 is the end of time on most Unix/Linux systems. If the system clock
was not set at all on your server, possible when the battery fails on
the clock chip, it might have gotten set to 2038.

Presumably there are bad log entries. The best thing to do is to correct
them, or delete them, but filtering will also work. It is also remotely
possible that Summary is having problems parsing the log entries
correctly, but I doubt that that is the problem here.

Good Luck
Jason
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