[LEAPSECS] Leap Sec vs Y2K

[Ian Batten]

> 

> This is because by-and-large software is written for the "lowest

> common denominator".


I am reminded of Spinal Tap's "We're cancelled in Boston, but don't worry, it's not a big college town".   Examples of protocols that get distinctly tetchy in the face of poor clock synch are, as has already been mentioned without seeming to upset your certainty, NFS (the computing glue of the nineties) and Kerberos/AD (the computing glue of the noughties).  The fomer needs clock synch except the documentation doesn't tell you (until you find "make" misbehaving because mtimes are being set by the client, not the server), and the latter documents it and drove the adoption of better time synch.   How you can use phrase like "by and large" when you're having to ignore two of the most significant distributed protocols of the past twenty years is something of a mystery.

ian