Uptime weirdness

Got unusual situation today. I was checking my server uptime because it was going to break 500 days and wanted to celebrate it. One day it was just fine saying:

10:05:53 up 487 days, 23:55, 5 users, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01

I just remembered that the box should have been breaked the record and checked the uptime again and it was saying:

17:02:24 up 10 days, 4:24, 5 users, load average: 0.16, 0.03, 0.01

So what happened? The box have not certainly been rebooted or anything. I've been happily running processes on it daily.

I'm still running old 2.4 kernel series on a faithful Debian sarge installation. A closer investigation showed that those old kernels have a bug which resets uptime after 497 days. It has been luckily fixed on 2.6 series kernels but it won't help me.


P.S. Luckily a couple days ago I got a new computer for development and test purposes. It's not the newest and shiniest one, nor cutting edge, but certainly faster and better than any of my laptops or other computers. It got a fairly ok graphics card (nVidia, and it's proprietary drivers sucks but it's still ok). Mainly I needed support for OpenGL shaders and framebuffer object extension and the nVidia card supports both of them. For now the box is running Ubuntu 7.10 because it's just the best choise at the moment, but will certainly test other distros when I get some time and I don't need it any more as a stable development environment. But I'm again excited to get a new toy, I have been using only laptops for quite a while and a desktop machine is really refreshing extra!