[LEAPSECS] W1K GPS rollover for some time servers

[Warner Losh]

> On May 5, 2015, at 7:02 PM, Tom Van Baak <tvb at LeapSecond.com> wrote:
> 
>> As seen at
>> http://lists.ntp.org/pipermail/hackers/2015-May/006866.html
>> and also as experienced at Keck Observatory last night, some models
>> of GPS time servers just did their firmware's W1K rollover, so those
>> are saying the date is 1995-09-17.
>> 
>> But the leap second is, inappropriately, getting the blame!
> 
> Steve,
> 
> Oh, this will make your day! Look what was just announced (and read the field service bulletin in the PDF attachment):
> 
> https://www.febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2015-May/091799.html
> 
> So, yes, we can sort of blame it on leap seconds. Or, actually, the lack of leap seconds. All this because the earth has been speeding back up the past decade.

This is an excellent example of the unintended consequences of leap seconds,
and the ways they insinuate themselves into non-obvious parts of the code.

Leap seconds were considered a clever way to ‘pace’ the GPS epoch. But then
the silly earth decided to slow down and this clever trick turned into an
embarrassing bug that was effectively an EOL event for the time servers in
question.

Warner

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