[LEAPSECS] more poison in the NTP pool

[Steve Allen]

On 2012 Sep 1, at 08:07, Warner Losh wrote:

> Does kinda show that it isn't trivial to get this right all the time...


With a notable percentage of the NTP servers always indicating leap
it's another instance of "Don't believe everything the internet says."

This begs for a compare and contrast with the validity of other forms
of information distributed around the internet; e.g., DNS.  Things like
How automatic is the setup of the service?
What sort of expertise is required for robust configuration?
What are the consequences of getting wrong information?
and other sorts of "How do different things break?"

But I think it's not optimal when a vendor like RedHat finds itself
defining notions of "precise" and "accurate" for its customers
as part of outlining the engineering workarounds.  That seems like
a shining example of how all the agencies involved in the definitions
of time scales have left implementation to be Somebody Else's Problem.
                                                                                
--
Steve Allen               <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory      Natural Sciences II, Room 165  Lat  +36.99855
University of California  Voice: +1 831 459 3046         Lng -122.06015
Santa Cruz, CA 95064      http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/   Hgt +250 m