[ntp:questions] False Reports of Leap-Seconds

Unruh unruh-spam at physics.ubc.ca
Mon Jan 26 00:00:41 UTC 2009


"David E. Ross" <nobody at nowhere.not> writes:

>I am seeing several NTP servers -- both strata 1 and 2 -- reporting
>leap-seconds in the middle of the month of January.  The 31 December
>2008 leap-second has already passed.  More important, the standard
>requires all leap-seconds to occur at the end of the last minute of a
>calendar month with a convention that they occur at the end of a
>calendar quarter.

June 30 or Dec 31, then Sep 30 or Mar 31, then the ends of other months if
there are more than 4 a year. 
ntp refuses to do any that are not June or Dec. 



>NTP servers that report leap-seconds within a month are buggy and should
>be fixed.  I have attempted to send E-mail messages to the operators of
>buggy servers that I have detected.  This is not always successful
>because listed E-mail addresses are sometimes obsolete.

Agreed. Some servers are just irresponsible. 
Mind you in many cases the server operators have no idea what ntp means,
and no idea even how to switch off the leap second report.



>Since I have not (and will not) test all NTP servers, operators reading
>this newsgroup should check their own servers to ensure they are not
>reporting false leap-seconds.

Well, maybe you will catch 1 in a thousand of them.




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