[ntp:questions] Spurious leap second

David J Taylor david-taylor at blueyonder.not-this-bit.nor-this-bit.co.uk
Mon Oct 1 05:54:29 UTC 2007


Folks,

Just for interest, one of my PCs started going wild on its timekeeping 
just after midnight.  It seems that one or more of the servers it was 
synched to has sent leap-second announcements for 2007-Oct-01.  Having 
inserted the leap-second, the time keeping oscillated from the correct 
second to the sprurious second, and a very high value became set in  the 
drift file (494 instead of about -70).  I don't know which server caused 
this (possibly in the pool).  Stopping NTP, resetting the drift file value 
to -72, and restarting NTP seems to have fixed the problem, and none of 
the servers now selected shows a 1 second offset.  See:

  http://www.david-taylor.myby.co.uk/mrtg/bacchus_ntp.html

Some of the other NTP clients seem to have experienced a slight glitch at 
the same time or slightly later as well, but kept their head.

  http://www.david-taylor.myby.co.uk/mrtg/daily_ntp.html

Cheers,
David





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