[Cerowrt-devel] cerowrt 3.3.8-17: nice latency improvements, some issues with bind

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, George Lambert wrote:

> Check and set the time by syncing to NTP Servers - not user supplied times
> if the network
> is available. to see if they have set times > those set by NTP Server

In theory you are right, in practice you are not.

it's not uncommon for systems to point at a local set of timeservers (GPS 
based for example), sometimes things go wrong with those servers, and so 
people configure a local fallback (because they need the clocks on the 
systems to remain consistant for things like kerberos to keep working). 
This leads to a failure mode where if something goes wrong on that system, 
the time can get set via NTP to some time in the future.

There needs to be a way to recover from such conditions.

The recent problems that people had with leap seconds is an indication 
that even if you do use Internet NTP servers, sometimes things go wrong.

David Lang