

Fake leap seconds being announced by NTP servers, still causing linux crashes - 0x0
http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/questions/2012-August/033611.html

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NelsonMinar
No need to panic; this event happend a few days ago, August 1. And no one's
certain, but it seems just as likely this is a bug in NTP as it is a
deliberate attempt to crash unpatched Linux servers. The way ntpd manages the
leap second flag is pretty complex and error prone.

Link to thread view of NTP list discussion:
[http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/questions/2012-August/thread....](http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/questions/2012-August/thread.html#33611)

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0x0
There is a need to worry, because AFAIK at least Debian hasn't provided
patches yet, so come September servers might still be crashing.

<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=679882>

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gus_massa
An idea: Setup a fake NTP server that inserts leap seconds randomly (for
example, once a week) (forward and backward). It could be use with test
servers to test if they are working correctly, before a real leap second crash
the production server.

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hatcravat
Leap seconds only occur at the end of a month, so an NTP client that accepted
such leapseconds would be non-compliant.

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bjork
Exactly how incompetent are linux coders? After all, the "problem" is
extremely trivial.

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justinhj
Feel free to patch it, I'm sure the world of linux coders would be happy to
have someone who finds this sort of matter trivial in their midst.

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bjork
Well, I'm not a linux coder, but I'll give it a try and report back if I'm
successful.

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sp332
I think it's already been patched. <https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/17/546>
(navigation on the left of the page)

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0x0
Looks like a long, 11-part patch set. Would be interesting to hear back from
'bjork' after his try to see if it is still trivial ;)

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sp332
<https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/1/25> Sounds like a race condition which is
pretty awkward to avoid.

