REMINDER: LEAP SECOND

Wed Jun 24 19:44:35 UTC 2015

That won't work. Being internally sync'ed isn't good enough for FINRA. All the machines must be synced to an external accurate source at least once per trading day.

Our plan is to disable our two stratum 1 servers, and our 3 stratum 2 servers before the leap second turnover, but to be 100% safe we would need to do that 24 hours before, but that would be a violation of FINRA regulations. 

It looks like the safest thing for us to do is to keep our NTP servers running and deal with any crashes/issues. That's better than having to deal with FINRA.

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Matthew Huff             | 1 Manhattanville Rd
Director of Operations   | Purchase, NY 10577
OTA Management LLC       | Phone: 914-460-4039
aim: matthewbhuff        | Fax:   914-694-5669

-----Original Message-----
From: Tore Anderson [mailto:tore at fud.no] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 3:26 PM
To: Matthew Huff
Cc: nanog2
Subject: Re: REMINDER: LEAP SECOND

* Matthew Huff

> I saw that, but it says the bits are set "before 23:59" on the day of
> insertion, but I was hoping that I could shut it down later than
> 23:59:59 of the previous day (8pm EST). The reason is FINRA
> regulations. We have to have the time synced once per trading day
> before the open according to the regulations.

Again AIUI, and I'm no NTP expert so I hope someone corrects me if I'm
wrong:

If you don't configure the "leapfile" ntpd option, the Leap
Indicator flag will flow down to your servers from the stratum-1s
servers you're synchronising from (directly or indirectly).

So what I think you could do, is to on the 29th remove all your
upstream servers from your NTP server's config, and set "fudge
127.127.1.0 stratum 3" or something like that so that clients will
still want to sync to it. At that point, your NTP server's clock chip
will be the reference clock, which might be drift-prone. To work around
that, you could at 8pm on the 30th stop ntpd, manually sync the system
clock with ntpdate, and start ntpd again. That should keep your NTP
server's clock reasonably synchronised, that provides your clients with
(a Leap Indicator-free) NTP service.

I make no guarantees that the above will work the way I think it will,
though... Try it at your own risk.

Tore