Leap second preparedness

I know, leap second preparedness is like sneeze preparedness to people
who have a life. But if you care about the pending hole in computers'
timeline, in about 2 minutes ntpd systems around the world will begin
announcing leap=01 instead of leap=00. If you are responsible for any
ntpd instances, you might spot check to be sure they are in fact
announcing the insertion a day in advance as intended. This is
particularly important for NTP servers relied upon by others.

If you find a system which is still advertising leap=00, you can
correct it by configuring a leapfile, assuming non-ancient ntpd
versions. See:

http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Support/ConfiguringNTP#Section_6.14.

If your ntpd is relying upon other NTP servers (that is, is stratum 2
or higher), it will not announce the pending leap second starting
exactly at midnight UTC in a few minutes, but should within a few
polling intervals. With the default maximum interval of 1024 seconds
being about 17 minutes, by 00:34 30-June UTC most systems should have
picked it up that will.

Cheers,
Dave Hart
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Google and leap seconds
    ... Wouldn't it be convenient for ntpd to have ... and adjust the clock speed instead? ... not have leap second support, then ntpd will step (exceeding the 128 ms ... manage leap second insertion the right way. ...
    (comp.protocols.time.ntp)
  • Re: What went wrong with the leap second
    ... >> server, may not have received the leap second announcement, and so ... Yes, but I guess you just saw what came out of the GPS receiver, or even ... >> How these announcements are passed to ntpd depends on how the leap second ... Martin Burnicki ...
    (comp.protocols.time.ntp)
  • Re: What went wrong with the leap second
    ... may not have received the leap second announcement, ... How these announcements are passed to ntpd depends on how the leap second ... Normally ntpd works exclusively with UTC, but on the other hand I know there ... to ntpd which is local time rather then UTC. ...
    (comp.protocols.time.ntp)
  • Re: WARNING: someones faking a leap second tonight
    ... configured ntpd to use the current leap second file ... Found that with both the current stable version and a current dev version the leap second warning in the reply packets already disappeared shortly *before* the leap second actually occurred. ... This means if this server sends a reply to a client shortly before the leap second the leap warning may have already been turned off, and thus the client might *disarm* the leap second shortly before the leap second occurs. ... This sounds like a bug to me, so I'm going to file a bug report for this. ...
    (comp.protocols.time.ntp)
  • Re: What went wrong with the leap second
    ... The idea is to mask the leap second; ... > How these announcements are passed to ntpd depends on how the leap second ... > to ntpd which is local time rather then UTC. ... GPS receiver instead of somebody elses NTPD. ...
    (comp.protocols.time.ntp)