[time-nuts] Tymserve 2100 thinks it's 1995?

[Bob Camp]

Hi

Before we all wail and moan about Tymeserve not rolling out a fix consider:

This is not exactly a brand new box. They already patched this issue once (a decade ago). 

There are some very big names in the business that cut non-security patch support at the 5 year point.

The market for this stuff never was big and it’s getting smaller. Supporting never ending patches on
a zero income product is tough. 

One of the main assets these companies have is their code base. The market may not be expanding. 
There’s always a chance to bundle the IP and sell it. The value of that IP goes to zero if you give
it away. 

Development costs these days are > 80% firmware / software. Most of the price you pay for a low volume gizmo 
like this is for IP. The (dirt cheap) silicon bits on the pc board don’t count much. The days of “hardware rules” 
are long gone. 

You can claim that software costs nothing once you write the first copy. In the next breath we all expect
to get ongoing customer support for that software and (errrr ) patches for this and that. When a vendor
charges us by the year for that support we are unhappy. 

Would I love to see all these 10 to 20 year old boxes running perfectly 20 years from now - sure. 
It’s a noble goal. I have a *lot* of boxes. With all the GPS issues in the past, and likely in the future - not likely to happen. 

Bob


> On May 4, 2015, at 2:23 PM, Mark Strovink <Mark.A.Strovink at mdnt.com> wrote:
> 
> Bob Martin <k6rtm at ...> writes:
> 
>> 
>> Additional information --
>> 
>> Power cycling (leaving it off for about 5 minutes) didn't do any good.
>> 
>> Once at the correct time/date, it bounces back to 1995 at about 30 seconds
> after the hour (now to Sep 18, 1995).
>> 
>> --------------------------------------------
>> 
>> My Tymserve 2100 gps unit (Rev 4.1) thinks it's 1995 -- September 17, 1995.
>> 
>> But a restart (connect via telnet and give the commands util restart)
> brings it back to the correct time and
>> date -- for a while? I haven't caught it dropping back, so i don't know if
> it's doing this on the hour, after an
>> hour, or what, but I noticed it last night, and I've restarted it a few
> times today.
>> 
>> Any clues?
>> 
>> I know about the off-by-a-second issue with the pending leap second. This
> one is more interesting!
>> 
>> So far I've just been issuing software restarts. The next time I'll power
> cycle the sucker and see if that
>> does any good.
>> 
>> GPS signal isn't the issue; the 2100 shares an external GPS antenna with
> my Thunderbolts through a
>> Symmetricom 58536A GPS splitter, and the Thunderbolts are as happy as a
> Thunderbolt can be.
>> 
>> cheers
>> 
>> bob k6rtm
>> 
>> 
> 
> What a great way to start a Monday: phone call that the entire domain was
> back in 1995.
> 
> The good news: Tymserve units will keep the correct date in Free mode.
> 
> GPS handling, not the GPS signail, is the problem.  The GPS unit is rolling
> the date over to its initial date once the date is past May 2 or 3,
> 2015.
> 
> The bad news: Tech support said the company will not be providing a fix for
> a product 5 years past end of support.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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