[ntpwg] Further to the timestamping issue

[M. Warner Losh]

picking a random email to reply to...

The problems that I've had with leapseconds:

(1) ntpd only advertises them a day in advance, which means brief
    outages can miss them.
(2) IRIG signals them only an hour in advance, which is too slow to
    drive ntpd from.
(3) There's no way to get the current offset easily from ntp servers
    since so few of them have the crypto setup to get the
    leapsecond.txt file.  This is especially true in "sensitive"
    networks with no connectivity to the internet.
(4) Machines off for a long time require a long time to get what the
    current UTC/TAI offset is.  GPS is good and can give the current
    offset, but there's no mechanism to get the intermediate values.
    Not totally critical, but customers notice when the historical
    leap seconds we made up in this case are wrong....  This is the
    'cold spare' problem...

These issues can be worked around, but they are all a pita.

Warner