[LEAPSECS] is leap smear legal in Germany?

[Martin Burnicki]

Steve,

Steve Allen wrote:
> The story about the German time broadcasts of DCF77 is in Bulletin
> Horaire.
[...]
> But now I am trolling and asking:
> Given that rubber seconds are illegal in Germany, is it legal to
> use Google/Amazon NTP servers that provide smeared leap seconds?

Thanks for the historic facts on DCF77, that's very interesting.

I don't know if it's legal or not, but I know some of our customers here
in Germany have explicitly configured their Meinberg LANTIME NTP servers
to do leap second smearing.

It's not because they like smearing seconds so much, it's just because
it's a reliable way to avoid problems caused by OS kernels which simply
step the system time back to insert a leap second.

Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

Senior Software Engineer

MEINBERG Funkuhren GmbH & Co. KG
Email: martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Phone: +49 5281 9309-414
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinburnicki/

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