[ntp:questions] Re: NTP, Unix and the 34-year itch

Roman Maeder maeder+news at mathconsult.ch
Sat Jan 24 10:39:02 UTC 2004


David L. Mills wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> I have retooled ntpd in the development version here as per my
> suggestions below and tested it in both Solaris and FreeBSD. The daemon
> sets the clock correctly  if within +-68 years of UTC. I tested it by
> setting the Unix clock to 1970 and then to 2036 and verified it works in
> both broadcast and unicast modes and with and without public key
> cryptography.

I just learned that big time offsets can come in places least expected. Twice 
over the last three weeks an otherwise well-behaved Sun Netra X1 with Solaris 
8 experienced a sudden change of its sytem time to exactly 100 years into the 
past, to January 1904 (while it was running). It though that at that time it 
was daylight saving time, so the time stamps in the syslogs were one hour off 
(syslog does not print the year, unfortunately). Only one service immediately 
suffered from this, ISC BIND 9, which started to generate assert failures. 
Ntpd would still serve out the (wrong) time to anyone who asked, so my other 
Netra, which synchronizes to the former one got this in the ntpd log:

22 Jan 04:32:57 ntpd[7610]: time correction of -1008276352 seconds exceeds 
sanity limit (1000); set clock manually to the correct UTC time.

(which is about 36 years, maybe -100 mod 136 ?)

There were no log messages from ntpd itself (which synchronized to a local DCF 
clock and a few external servers).

It was not trivial to set the time back to a correct value. "date" cannot 
handle such large corrections, but ntpdate took care of the rest:

Jan 22 09:03:20 ntpdate[305]: [ID 702911 daemon.notice] step time server 
129.132.2.21 offset -1139207214.011402 sec

(which is about 36 years)

I don't know what caused the problem. The value of exactly 100 years suggests 
some left-over of the Y2K problem. But the recent discussion in this group 
with the magical 34 years made me think about 1970+34 = 2004. Is it 
conceivable that ntpd itself had something do to with this? I rather doubt it.

Roman Maeder




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