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How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)

talesfromtheopsside.com

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Re: How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)

#5

Post by nytesky »

A couple years ago we had issues caused by a 0 (zero) leap second, which honestly I couldn’t find documented anywhere but hacker news! Something about the system expects a leap second every 17 years and if it doesn’t get one it’s more troublesome than the 0 leap second.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27944776

Re: How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)

#6

Post by zokier »

ahazred8ta wrote: post #4

We've already discussed the Leap Smear, where clocks run 0.0012% slower for a day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047714 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

And inevitably there is also Leap Unsmear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223591

By Google. Who started this whole trend of leap smearing in the first place.

Re: How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)

#7

Post by zokier »

ripe wrote: post #3
frantic2821 wrote: post #2

TLDR: a leap second overloaded computer systems due to issues in how Linux handles time.

Time to plug my old explanation of leap seconds: https://robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2022-11-20-stopwatch-time...

> As you can see, UTC is not a proper, continuous time stream. It has breaks in it wherever leap seconds have been added

I can not see that. 23:59:58 - 23:59:59 - 23:59:60 - 00:00:00 is perfectly continuous, proper, and even monotonic, or at least as much as 23:59:58 - 23:59:59 - 00:00:00 is.

> When you receive a package with a computer-generated time stamp, it is showing this fudged UTC number, not the actual number of seconds according to the atomic stream.

I think you are mixing up UNIX timestamps (which are their own thing) and UTC. UTC and TAI both indicate exactly same thing, there is perfect 1:1 mapping between UTC timestamps and TAI timestamps (ignoring pre-1972 era).

Re: How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)

#8

Post by tinix »

zokier wrote: post #6
ahazred8ta wrote: post #4

We've already discussed the Leap Smear, where clocks run 0.0012% slower for a day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047714 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

And inevitably there is also Leap Unsmear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223591 By Google. Who started this whole trend of leap smearing in the first place.

Google didn't start this... It's standard practice to speed up or slow down the clock during transition in ERP systems.

VAX/VMS are way older than Google.

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