Leap second tonight

Mon Jan 5 16:30:51 UTC 2009

This begs the question - how the heck do timekeepers and politicians get
away with last minute time changes?

Surely there's -some- pushback from technology related interest groups to
try and get more than four weeks warning? :)

Adrian

On Mon, Jan 05, 2009, Frank Bulk wrote:
> A report from a DHCP/DNS appliance vendor here:
> ====================
> Several customers have reported a complete lock-up of their Proteus system
> around the beginning of January 1st 2009. We believe that we have traced
> this to a problem in the underlying kernel and NTP and the handling of the
> date change associated with 2008 being a Leap Year and therefore having 366
> days.
> 
> Several conditions must be met to trigger this problem:
> 1. The Proteus was originally installed as v2.1.x or earlier.
> 2. NTP is enabled as a client with 2 or more external source servers
> defined.
> 3. There is a discrepancy in the times reported back by these other NTP
> servers.
> 
> There is no correction available at this time, and the resolution is to
> power cycle the system, after which it will run fine.
> 
> If you experienced a similar problem at the indicated time, please submit a
> trouble ticket so that we can confirm that this occurred on your system.
> ====================
> 
> I don't know what the underlying OS is.
> 
> Frank
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin Day [mailto:toasty at dragondata.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 4:42 PM
> To: NANOG list
> Subject: Leap second tonight
> 
> 
> Just a reminder that there's a leap second tonight.
> 
> Last time I watched for what happened on 01/01/2006, there was a
> little bit of chaos:
> http://markmail.org/message/cpoj3jw5onzhhjkr?q=%22kevin+day%22+leap+second+r
> eminder+nanog&page=1&refer=cnkxb3iv7sls5axu
> 
> I've been told that some of the causes of these problems are fixed on
> any reasonably recent ntp distribution, but just in case, you might
> wanna keep an eye out if you're seeing any weirdness. The worst damage
> I'd heard from anyone after that event was their clock being
> significantly off for several hours.
> 
> -- Kevin
> 
> 
> 

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