[ale] OT ntp - leap second - how many knew what this was 3 weeks ago

Ron Frazier (ALE) atllinuxenthinfo at techstarship.com
Wed Jul 4 10:39:31 EDT 2012


Hi all,

Around the beginning of this year, I was doing quite a bit of research into ntp and gps and eventually set up my own gps based ntp time server in both Linux and Windows. At the end of June, a leap second was inserted into the time sequences of the clocks on Earth. For those that may not know what that is, the atomic clocks are coordinated with the earth's rotation, so, for example, when the clock says noon, the sun is always roughly overhead. However, the earth's rotation speeds up and slows down at times. So,sometimes, we have to tweak the clocks to match the earth again. At the end of June, an extra second was inserted. Normally, the seconds go 58 ... 59 ... 00. This time, they went 58 ... 59 ... 60 ... 00. As it turns out, this crashed a number of servers.

I find this very interesting, and somewhat scary as a potential programmer. Since I'm thinking of learning programming again, and since I have an interest in timekeeping, I have considered writing a world clock program etc., to show the time in different parts of the world. However, prior to my NTP research, I never knew about the leap second. So, there would have been a good possibility, had I written the program prior to this year, that my program would have crashed as well.

So, my question is, how many of you knew about leap seconds prior to this incidence of it and prior to my describing it. If you were writing a clock program, would you have known to account for this?

Sincerely,

Ron


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Ron Frazier
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linuxdude AT techstarship.com
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