[time-nuts] IEEE Spectrum Magazine interviews one of our own...
cook michael
michael.cook at sfr.fr
Wed May 25 06:30:55 UTC 2011
Le 25/05/2011 04:00, Tom Holmes a écrit :
<snip>
Steven Cherry is exaggerating when he says " most systems go down for
planned maintenance instead of trying to deal with leap seconds in real
time."
As someone who has been supporting major industrial, banking, airline
systems for the last 30 years, I remember NO down time, or outage due to
leap second insertion. In fact, I don't know of any commercial
applications, that care about it. Most systems administrators that I had
contact with didn't know that th leap seconds existed, and did not
configure, check or update their ntp servers to enable them to be taken
into account. There were of course outages and errors due to clock
updates, but they were all attributable to operators trying to change
the clocks by large increments manualy or bad ntp configurations, such
as allowing large step changes instead of slewing . We have up till now
been faced only with positive leap second insertion, but negative
updates are also possible. Testing I have done on unix based operating
systems show no adverse effects to negative leap second insertion either.
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