nanog mailing list archives

Re: Leap second tonight


From: Adrian Chadd <adrian () creative net au>
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 01:30:51 +0900

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 () 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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