This year's Y2K: 'Leap second' threatens to break the Internet

groze said:

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What happens if the IERS network time servers goes down? Does Unix crash?

That would be the end of time, much worse than Unix crashing.:)

Kari said:

...You are not often right but this time you are wrong ...

Sorry but that tickled my funny bone for some reason.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Kari said:

...You are not often right but this time you are wrong ...

Sorry but that tickled my funny bone for some reason.

At least someone understood it.

This is a good read to get a primer on the Network Time Protocol and why leap seconds matter to the internet:

Network Time Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Further down in the article you should note that servers adhering to the NTP should already be able to handle a leap second.
It looks like devices using time stamp protocols other than NTP could be affected.

TVeblen said:

This is a good read to get a primer on the Network Time Protocol and why leap seconds matter to the internet:
Network Time Protocol - Wikipedia
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From the wiki page TVeblen linked:

wikipedia said:

Leap seconds
... Because of the requirement that time must appear to be monotonically increasing,
a leap second is inserted with the sequence: 23:59:59, 23:59:60, 00:00:00
Although the clock is actually halted during the event, any processes that query the system time cause it to increase by a tiny amount, preserving the order of events. If it should ever become necessary, a leap second would be deleted by skipping 23:59:59

There seems to be a few solutions to this already available for the server side of things.

System programs are probably hardened by now, application programs, maybe not so much.

There's a lot of old software out that that is being maintained by one person. This might be a consultant who only supports the software when there is an issue.

How did (do?) some programs determine the passage of a day? Magic!

The magic number 1440 to be exact. That's all there was, no more than 1440.

Or 86,400 !

Slartybart said:

The magic number 1440 to be exact. That's all there was, no more than 1440.

TVeblen said:

Or 86,400 !

I was also wondering that about 1,440, number of minutes in a day. If we are talking about seconds per day that's of course 86,400.

It is fascinating that we have the technology to measure time so accurately that we can tell the Earth's rotation varies. That is really something. Kari you have to forgive grove. He is a Hoosier from Indiana which until recently did not do DST and parts near Chicago and the Far South West around Evansville are on Central time. The rest of the State is on Eastern time with DST. Before the state did DST the counties in several areas ignored the general time and followed DST. This happened around Louisville Kentucky those counties followed Louisville time so the TV schedules were correct. Some of the Northern counties did some weird things too even though they were not supposed to. That is why it is so confusing to Indiana natives until recently where we now seem to have the best plan. However some want to put the state on Central time which may lead to more problems such as darker evenings in Winter and early sunset in Summer.

TVeblen said:

Or 86,400 !

Thanks for doing the math TVeblen