[time-nuts] can of worms: time-of-day in a community radio station

[Steven Sommars]

I scanned the NTP pool last leap second and relayed the list of offenders
to Ask.
NTP pool servers may use a mixture of smeared and non-smeared upstream
servers.  Yuck.

While the NTP pool has limitations it is widely used (and abused).  NTP
servers outside of the NTP pool may also be imperfect.


On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 11:01 AM J.R. <themadbeaker at gmail.com> wrote:

> > You can't test a server for smearieness.  It wouldn't surprise me if
> some of
> > them turn out to be getting time from google servers or something
> similar.
>
> True, but you *can* see which upstream time source has been selected
> for a NTP server. Ask went through the pool servers last leap-second
> and contacted all the owners that were returning a Google IP as their
> primary time source to get them to change their configuration.
> Likewise, said servers that weren't reconfigured in time were pulled
> out of rotation during the event to prevent any issues. So there
> *were* some preventative measures taken.
>
> AFAIK, the only *big* public time services that do leap-smearing are
> Google & Amazon.
>
> Yes, I know a person *can* configure their own NTP server to do
> smearing too.... But if that one second is mission critical, then you
> are probably taking a lot more care choosing upstream time sources.
>
> _______________________________________________
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at lists.febo.com
> To unsubscribe, go to
> http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com
> and follow the instructions there.
>