Distributed File System Issue - Jan 1 1970 Dated Files

Issue

If you notice files in your application with a date of Jan 1 1970 as the last time they were modified, this could be indicative of an issue with the distributed file system.

You can view the date modified for a file with ls -l:

-rw-rw-r--  1 d.skaad staff 115K Jan  1  1970 creative-button2.jpg
-rw-rw-r--  1 d.skaad staff  95K Jan  1  1970 standard-button3.jpg
-rw-rw-r--  1 d.skaad staff  46K Jan  1  1970 faded-button4.jpg

Resolution

Option 1: Do nothing. If this is not causing issues with accessibility to your files, you do not need to take action.

Option 2: Replace the files with the incorrect modified dates manually.

Option 3: Change the timestamps for all files, if the dates are unimportant to preserve, you can:

Recursively change the date accessed and modified date to "now":

find . -print | while read filename; do

    # change the date accessed and modified date to "now"

    touch -a -m  "$filename"

done

Option 4: If, however, files are inaccessible,  there could be an underlying issue which requires the the distributed file system to be remounted. Please file a ticket with our Support Team to help investigate issues of file inaccessibility.

Please note that we are working internally to eliminate these issues in the future.

Cause

Web servers can lose their mount points to the distributed file system, causing errors for files that can not be accessed. The root cause is an instability in the distributed file system layer.