On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 11:24 AM, Peter Eckel lists@eckel-edv.de wrote:
On the other hand I'm a bit surprised that the problems were comparably few - actually there is a time '01:59:60' for one second, and any plausibility check I've ever seen assumes that minutes and seconds are in the range from 0..59. Wrongly, it seems.
Apparently Google uses an approach that looks much less risky to me - they use a time window over which they 'smear' the leap second by making their time servers lie about the time for a while, making it pass a little bit slower. That way they avoid the unlucky 61st second and still advance the clocks within a reasonable time.
http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html
Interesting, but I thought that ntp clients always advanced the clock by small fractions of a second anyway even when the master source differs by more.